


Vengeance Drives For Uber

by rokhal



Series: The Legend of Hillrock Heights [2]
Category: Ghost Rider (Comics), Marvel (Comics)
Genre: Ableist Language, Anger, Anger Management, Angst and Humor, Brutal Murder, Canon Disabled Character, Community: smallfandombang, Disability, Don't Like Don't Read, Emotional Manipulation, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Family, Family Feels, Fast Cars, Gen, He has it coming if you believe in that kind of thing, Investigations, Mentor Eli Morrow, Murder, Non-Graphic Rape/Non-Con, Original Character Death(s), Original Character(s), Past Domestic Violence, Police, Psychological Drama, Psychopathology & Sociopathy, References to Drugs, Robbie Reyes Has PTSD, Robbie Reyes' Terrible Kill Code, Robbie straight-up murders a guy in this fic, Roman Catholicism, Sex Work, Sexist Language, Small Fandom Big Bang, Taxis, Uber, Vigilantism, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-20
Updated: 2019-04-20
Packaged: 2020-01-06 01:25:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 115,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18378101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rokhal/pseuds/rokhal
Summary: Last year, eighteen-year-old legal guardian Robbie Reyes made a deal with the ghost of the serial killer possessing his body: together they will unleash their rage on those who endanger Los Angeles, and when they find someone truly evil, truly deserving, they will kill them. Since he made the deal, they've maimed plenty, but killed no one, and the ghost is getting impatient.Robbie gets a side-job driving his Ghost Rider car for Uber. This goes about as well as one could hope: he doesn't attack any passengers, but he does stumble upon a murder victim.Robbie wants the killer to pay, for reasons he does not understand. Eli wants Robbie to finally fulfill his end of the deal and kill somebody, anybody. To avenge the innocent dead, Robbie is finally willing to cooperate. They work together to identify and hunt the killer.Meanwhile, Lisa takes Robbie to meet her parents, Robbie plans for his future, Ramón Cordova pays it forward, Guero Valdez adapts, the woman who got slipped a pink pill puts her apartment back together, a cop from New York comes out west hunting Ghost Riders, and Gabe understands more than Robbie knows.





	1. Be your own boss and earn extra cash!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last year, Robbie Reyes was murdered. The ghost of his serial-killing Satanist hitman uncle, "Eli Morrow," brought him back to life as a Ghost Rider, hoping to use Robbie for his own purposes. He tried to tempt him to kill, under the guise of "revenge" or "burning up human rubbish."
> 
> Robbie resisted him, until a Russian mobster put a gun to his little brother's head. This exchange followed:
> 
> "By killing Yegor Ivanov, you've avenged me...and bonded our souls eternally. You may have saved Gabe's soul, but you've thrown any hopes of getting rid of me right out the window.  
> "I will curse you. I will plague your body and soul until you rot from within. I will consume you with anger, hatred, and the urge to kill. Your will may be strong, kid, but not strong enough to withstand a satanic serial killer's eternal lust for murder.  
> "It will consume you...and you will murder again."
> 
> "I'll make you a deal. Find me the worst scum on the planet--find me those who torture, kill and rape--find me the foulest darkest degenerate souls to walk the earth--people like YOU, Eli Morrow--and I'll gladly destroy them. But I will kill no one else."
> 
> Six months later and Robbie still hasn't fulfilled his deal.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please check out the awesome moodboard art by MistressKat!  
> https://archiveofourown.org/works/18532147
> 
> Thanks to IRL writing buddy CB for beta work! *waves* 
> 
> I started writing this last summer. This has consumed my life. Headcanons established here have underpinned all the Ghost Rider fics you've seen from me. Is there a plot? Plot is over-rated. There are many sub-plots! There is an arc!
> 
> Uber stories were stolen from Uber driver subreddits. Major OCs were inspired by Ann Rule's true crime books. Ghost Rider characters are drawn from All-New Ghost Rider (2014) and Ghost Rider (2016), with a guest from Ghost Rider (1990) and cameos from Leverage (TV).
> 
> There is a plot thread in this fic where Robbie is studying for his GED. He thinks of himself as having dropped out of high-school, but really he is finishing early, and he will finish with high marks. 
> 
> A major inaccuracy I have introduced, which I will not apologize for, is that I've given the Charger a manual transmission, when it says right there in the comic book that it is a 3-speed automatic. I don't like automatic transmissions, I don't understand automatic transmissions, and I don't know how to write them in a way that sounds badass. Also, Tradd Moore's art depicts a manual transmission. So. 
> 
> Do read the tags and the warnings in chapter notes. I cannot guarantee that I have sufficiently warned for each individual chapter, but I have tried.

Just after dawn on a Thursday in September, not even one week into the new school year, Robbie Reyes woke from an exhausted sleep to the tap, shuffle, thump of his brother Gabe's crutches down the hall in the kitchen.

His body was already sitting up, his used laptop warm and humming on his lap.

Not good.

He'd stayed up half the night worrying about money, searching message boards for local street races, re-jiggering his budget on a spreadsheet. Wages too low, hours and shifts too few, sitters' rates too high and the interest on the Care Credit ticking ever upward. He needed big cash, he needed to win races. Or some side-job, a hustle, something morally tolerable if not legal, high-paying, work-from-home or short hours for big paychecks. Something. Anything. He was slipping back into debt and Gabe needed him.

He should have just slept.

“ **Sleeping beauty's awake,** ” his body purred, an unfamiliar sardonic smile pulling at his lips. His finger mashed the nubbin in the middle of the keyboard, switching between unfamiliar tabs: a Tor browser, open to what looked very much like Craigslist ads, but weren't.

Locked out of his own motor cortex, Robbie gathered himself, taking stock as best he could while unable to move his eyes. _Eli! You fucker. What'd you do? Did you talk to Gabe? You're not allowed to talk to Gabe!_

Eli snorted. “ **Exactly whaddya think I'd want with the runt when I got you? Gabe woke up on his own some time after six. Heard him brushin' his own teeth and everything. I've been here the whole time,** _ **helping you**_ **. Ever since your street-racing gig fell through—** ”

_No thanks to you._

“ **It was inevitable. The Hell Charger is too obvious even when we're not on fire, and we were cheating. Of fuckin' course you're blacklisted. Only a half-wit would race us for money.** _ **But here,**_ ” Eli stabbed Robbie's finger at the screen. “ **Lookit this. Just lookit this walking rubbish-heap. Clark Anthony Crawford.** ” Eli switched to a new tab, this one showing the man's arrest record. “ **Rape, statutory rape, first and second-degree rape, child rape. It's like he collects badges. Assault and battery, larceny, grand larceny. Passing counterfeit bills. Oh, and rape, rape, rapitty-rape.** ” He switched back to Not-Craigslist. “ **Twenty bitcoin to smoke him before his testimony on October third. That's, what, fifty grand in 1999 dollars. Buy a lotta pills. Shiny new pair of crutches for your ball and chain out there.** ”

Robbie's consciousness tightened under his skin. Fifty grand was what got him saddled with Eli last year. Fifty grand, the dream of moving himself and Gabe to a new home in a safe neighborhood, with a clean reliable bus system and good schools, where a kid like Gabe could drive his wheelchair home from the Development Center without getting robbed, where the playgrounds didn't have used needles hiding in the sand, where the loud pops and bangs in the night were really just fireworks instead of gunfire. Racing for fifty grand had landed him dead in an alley next to a stolen car, and now, possessed by the evil ghost of his long-lost uncle, Eli Morrow.

_I'm not shutting up a witness for the Irish Mob,_ Robbie said. He tested the limits of his body, feeling the boards under his bare feet, the whirr of the laptop fan against his thigh. He tried to make his presence relaxed, easy, don't-worry-about-me. Eli used his eyes to focus on the picture on the ad, a schlubby-looking middle-aged man with acne scars and retreating red hair.

“ **The Feebs are gonna nail a couple bit players on his testimony, call it a day, then roll this guy in cotton wool and ship him to Iowa for witness protection,** ” Eli said.

_Like you care. I'm not killing people for money. Stop using Gabe against me._

“ **Listen, you ungrateful shit. I have skills and know-how to pull down six figures a year, and with my powers, we'd be uncatchable. You sit around whining about your precious brother and your morals and your feelings, but I try one time to help you out and you shove it in my face. Remember our deal: sooner or later, preferably sooner, you're gonna kill someone. Might as well make it mutually beneficial.** ”

_Not like this._

“ **You know, when I first found you, I thought, this here's a kid with spunk. This here's a kid with fire. Drag-racing my car you stole out of your own auto shop. Trash-talking gangsters. Holes in your earlobes I could stick a pencil through. But instead you are the most boring, responsible young man I ever had the displeasure to meet.** ”

Gabe's crutches approached from the hallway, stopping at the closed door. A knock, enthusiastic. “Robbie-Robbie! Breakfast's ready! Time to wake up!”

Eli rolled Robbie's eyes, annoyed at the interruption, and in his distraction, Robbie tackled him from behind and stuffed himself back into his body. “Just a minute, Gabe!” Robbie called. He coughed. Checked his browser history—automatically deleted, dammit Eli. But the arrest records website appeared to have a paywall. “Did you spend my money on this?” he hissed.

**Our money. Hey, let's see what El Bobo did to the kitchen.**

Rage flared. Robbie'd fingers tensed and the slanting scars on his scalp burned. He shoved it own, even as he felt Eli making a grab for control again. “Gabe knows how to be safe,” Robbie growled, rather than admit that he was a little worried himself.

Gabe had changed and grown in the past year and a half, mostly for the better. From the chaotic and tense environment of the foster system, Robbie had moved him back to their childhood apartment in Hillrock Heights, an affordable neighborhood in East LA. Now, at least within their four rented walls, there was no yelling, no one to steal or destroy Gabe's action figures or comics, and no one to tell him to be quiet unless he could talk normal. Robbie enrolled Gabe at the Patrick Wellman Development Center and scraped together a couple hundred bucks a month for meetings with Dr. Dacosta, who helped get Gabe learning and talking more, and had switched him to new, modern anti-seizure drugs and muscle relaxants—medications that worked better and didn't _sedate Gabe_ so damn much.

With less stress and sedation, and with Robbie around to listen and play with him every night he wasn't working at Canelo's, Gabe was a different kid. Social, curious, kind, empathetic. He could learn anything he thought was cool—so he knew a lot about cars and comics mythology, not so much math and social studies. Speech therapy was coming along, so now instead of blank stares he got to have conversations with strangers. Choking was no longer a daily terror. His tremor was less on the new meds, and he could follow along with his How To Draw Superheroes book, given a full sheet of paper and a big pen. Dr. Dacosta was so pleased with his physical and social progress over the summer that she'd arranged for him to join integrated classes at the middle school three days a week this fall.

But not all his recent changes were good.

Gabe pushed himself hard, especially with mobility: so hard Robbie was afraid his little brother would hurt himself. He'd gotten up on crutches that spring, then over the summer had a growth spurt that left him too lanky and uncoordinated. Robbie and the physiotherapists had helped him get back out of his power chair and onto the forearm crutches again, but now Gabe was overtaxing himself with them. He was just fourteen. He was still growing. Even healthy fourteen-year-olds had a hard time putting on muscle. Every time Gabe came for a physio appointment, the therapists told Robbie to let him take breaks, but Robbie wasn't discouraging him from using the power chair, far from it—but what was he supposed to do, take away an accomplishment that was so important to him?

More worrisome than the strain on Gabe's shoulders were the anxious looks Gabe now cast at Robbie every time they'd been separated, even for five minutes. The insistent, even desperate way he demanded to do things on his own, and the constant glances back: _I can do it, see? Am I doing it right? I can help. I can be useful._

“Robbie-Robbie! You okay?” Across the door, Gabe sounded nervous, but more than that, like he was pretending not to be nervous. He'd never used to hide anything from anyone, especially not Robbie. Maybe it was good. Like Dr. Dacosta said, maybe he was just starting to act his age.

“I'm okay, buddy! Thank-you for checking on me!” Robbie hollered, and threw on fresh underwear and a band t-shirt and yesterday's jeans. He opened the door slowly. Gabe had propped himself up against the wall by the doorjam, noodly arms occupied with his forearm crutches, gazing up at Robbie with his huge green eyes. No hug, apparently. A tentative smile that broke Robbie's heart. “You made breakfast for me, this time?”

“Yes,” Gabe said with a swinging nod of his head. He looked up at him and stared, steadying himself against the wall. “Robbie?”

“Yeah, buddy.”

“Robbie-Robbie.” He grinned suddenly, like his old self, and crutched into the kitchen.

“Wow, you're getting strong on those,” Robbie said, following. On the kitchen table sat two bowls of frosted Wheaties, with spoons, empty cups, and paper towels folded into little pyramids for napkins. A pile of other paper towels, failed pyramids, sat on the edge of the table between them. There was a pot on the stove; Robbie hurried over to look. The burner was off, the pot was cool. Inside was a pile of dry macaroni and an unopened foil packet of cheesy powder. Fine, fine. Just add water. The Wheaties box had been closed and replaced on the counter. A gallon of milk, mostly full, sat on the floor beside the refrigerator. Gabe's power chair sat against the counter, near the microwave.

The kitchen smelled like eggs.

“I made Wheaties for breakfast! I made mac'n'cheese for dinner! But it's not dinner now so you don't cook it yet!”

“You got it all figured out,” Robbie said, picking up the milk. Still cold. A bit too heavy for Gabe to comfortably lift. “You left the milk for me to pour so the Wheaties don't get soggy? Good idea.”

Gabe gave him another too-shy smile, and backed himself up against one of the kitchen chairs. He scooted onto the seat, slipped his hands out of his crutches. He was a good two feet away from the table. Robbie stepped around to push his chair in.

“I can do it,” Gabe said, suddenly firm.

Robbie hated to undermine him, but he was reasonably sure he could not scoot his own chair up to the table. “I like helping you.”

“What if you stop?” Gabe demanded. Robbie froze.

_Eli, you fucker, you did this, bastard, you broke us—_

**Don't blame me,** Eli said.

“I'll never stop caring about you, buddy,” Robbie said. Gabe wouldn't meet his eyes. “I'll always be here for you. I'm not going anywhere.” He wasn't even sure he could die anymore. “Do you want to push the chair in together?” Gabe shook his head. He rocked back and forth on the chair, scooted a tiny bit. “That looks like it'll take a long time. Do you want to eat in your wheelchair?”

Gabe shot a long, opaque look at the power chair. “Yeah,” he said at last. He slipped his right forearm into one crutch, but knocked the other crutch to the floor with his elbow. “Oh,” he said softly.

“I got it, I got it,” Robbie said, and scurried around the table to help him get up. Gabe got his crutches arranged, tipped forward onto them, and backed himself into the power chair and drove to the table while Robbie moved the kitchen chair out of the way and poured milk and orange juice. He left for the bathroom to get Gabe's meds for him, put them in Gabe's special cup. When he got back, Gabe stared at him. He'd spilled milk on the table; his tremor was worse when he was anxious. “You okay, buddy?” Robbie asked, meeting his eyes as Gabe scanned his outline over and over again.

“I'm okay, Robbie,” Gabe said at last. He mopped surreptitiously at the drips of milk with his pyramid napkin. Must have been something they'd showed him at school: origami to practice hand-eye coordination.

Robbie picked up one of the paper towels from the pile on the table and reached over to help.

“No,” Gabe stopped him.

“Okay, you got it.” Robbie sat back.

“No. That—that's a bad napkin,” Gabe said, waving at the pile. “Sorry.”

“They're good if they're still clean,” Robbie reassured him. He choked down the rest of his cereal. Watched Gabe take his pills. Stood. Washed and dried his bowl.

The egg smell was coming from the microwave. Robbie opened the door and found half-cooked egg and shell fragments misted over the whole interior. “Buddy,” he sighed.

Gabe squeaked.

Robbie turned.

Gabe stared up at him, eyes very wide, his spoon in his right fist, dripping. “Sorry.”

“It's okay,” Robbie said quickly. Gabe started rocking subtly and he began to sniffle. Robbie felt himself choke up, too. He was helpless. He couldn't fix this. “Hey, now we both know what happens when you heat an egg in the microwave, right?” He swallowed hard. “I never knew that.”

“Sorry. Robbie?”

“Yeah. I'm not mad. Promise.”

“Robbie?”

“Yeah, Gabe?” _You did this, Eli. You made him afraid of me._ His eyes burned: tears, then steam. He took a long slow, breath, tried to think of something else.

Gabe grabbed his wrist suddenly. “Robbie's not mad. Promise?”

Robbie wiped his nose on one of the half-folded napkins. “I promise I'm not mad at you, Gabe. I love you.”

**You need therapy.**

_Rich, coming from you._

**If you took contract kills, you could afford your own therapist.**

_Fuck off._

* * *

 

Last year, after Eli and the Hell Charger had attached themselves to Robbie's life, Robbie had pole-vaulted out of debt with stacks of cash he'd won racing a supernaturally-enhanced car in underground street races. He'd stopped taking night shifts at the auto shop. Suddenly he'd had all the time and money he'd needed to take care of Gabe properly. But you couldn't win every race, every time, and never stay for a chat or a smoke, without the secretive but gossipy underground street racing community taking notice. You couldn't find the big races with the thousand dollar purses without an invite, and over the summer the invites had dried up. Now it was fall again. Senior year. But like hell was Robbie working late shift at Canelo's and leaving his brother to a sitter every night again. He thanked his teachers and checked out a pile of GED prep books from the school library.

He asked Canelo to put him on day shift full-time. But cash flow was low at the moment, and in Canelo's words, “You're great with a wrench, Reyes. People, not so much. I'm not paying you to give Ramón Cordova murder-eyes eight hours a day.” So he got day shift three times a week, and some nights, and a few odd hours—nowhere near enough.

In desperation, Robbie checked the pawn shops to see how much cash he could get for the TV in case they needed it for Gabe's next medication refill. He could hardly give the thing away.

Now he was panicking.

_Maybe the Rider can rob cash off drug dealers,_ Robbie thought, collapsing into bed after reading a third of a vocabulary prep book in one sitting.

**Yes. Perfect use of our powers.**

_Fuck off._ Robbie willed himself to go to sleep faster. He couldn't afford to let Eli take over again like he had that morning. _I don't need to steal. I...I got good grades. I'm a great mechanic—no formal training. I...have a car...with a fudged title...that can win races, if I can find any ever again._

**You're highly qualified for prostitution, and, let me repeat,** _**contract killing.** _ **Think about it.**

_I could be an Uber driver._

Eli was silent for a blessed minute. Robbie wondered if he even knew what Uber was. **You know, kid. That may be your dumbest idea yet. But I need a laugh. Let's drive some Ubers.**

* * *

 

As it turned out, to drive for Uber you had to be at least twenty-one years old with three years of licensed driving experience, and your car had to have four doors and be no older than ten years.

**Piece o'cake,** Eli cackled. **There's a card in my treasure chest. Go get it.**

Robbie retrieved his uncle's lock-box, which Eli had hidden in the floorboards in Gabe's room before his death. Gabe freaked out whenever he saw the box, so Robbie stored it out of sight high on a closet shelf. In the lockbox were six expired passports and driver's licenses in different names all bearing Eli's picture, a few photographs of Eli with Robbie's parents, ten thousand dollars in cash dated from the 1990's (now gone to pay Gabe's medical bills) and at least two dozen business cards and cocktail napkins with names and phone numbers.

**Princeton. That's the one.**

“That his name, Princeton?” Robbie muttered, squinting at the smudged and water-stained napkin.

**Spooks don't get names, kid. Call 'em. But let me do the talking.**

“Can't he trace the call to my phone?”

**Takes time to triangulate off the cell towers; we'll be done in under a minute.**

“They can just pull the GPS data,” Robbie growled. “Everyone knows that.”

**Fuck future fuckery what the fuck. First I need a special 'browser,' now I can't use my fucking phone? And of fucking course there's no more fucking payphones anymore. You can shove your fucking future up your ass, boy. Fucking hell.**

“What makes you think this number's even still good?” Robbie demanded.

Eli sputtered a bit in the back of his head. **Well, not trying it won't get us nowhere.**

The next day Robbie found a functioning pay phone and called Princeton, relaxing his clenched-jawed grip on his body enough that Eli could borrow his voice and hands.

The phone rang, and rang, and rang. They listened, nervous and tense, to fifteen rings. Then Eli hung up and called again. Three rings. Then, feeding in more quarters, he called a third time, and this time the phone picked up on the second ring.

“Who the hell has this number?” a hoarse voice demanded. Robbie couldn't tell if Princeton was a man, or a woman who smoked heavily.

“ **Daaaaaaarlin,** ” Eli drawled. “ **It's your old pal. You taught me wire fraud, I taught you how to kill a man with a pencil.** ”

Silence.

“ **Tulsa. Ninety-two.** ”

A tapping sound over the line, like someone clicking fingernails against the handset.

“ **It's me,** ” he snapped. “ **Eli Morrow.** ”

“Morrow's dead.”

“ **Yeah, mostly. Say, you read the news over in L.A.? Fella named Ivanov met a fiery end?** ”

“What's that got to do with Eli Morrow?”

“ **Well, I'm mostly dead now. That changes a man's M. O.** ”

A heavy sigh, the snick of a doorlatch, a rustle of clothing. “Eli. Tell me what you want.”

“ **Thank-you. I want you to bring Eliot Miller back to life.** ”

“That's a handful.” _What?_ Robbie asked. **Code. Means five grand.**

“ **You caught me a little short-handed, but if you look close at that news out of L.A., you'll find it worth your while if I owe you a favor.** ”

Another sigh. Then, “This is your way of pretending you're not blackmailing me.”

“ **I'm a great guy like that.** ”

“Fine. Eliot Miller. How old is the bastard now, sixty? Sixty-seven. Damn. You're pretty spry for a retiree, Eli.”

“ **Well, I did get both hips replaced.** ”

* * *

 

Eliot Miller was a law-abiding citizen. Eliot Miller was a retired accountant from New Mexico, with a new AARP membership and no criminal history aside from a few parking tickets thrown in for color. Mr. Miller's background check breezed through Uber's registration system.

The Charger was another matter. It wasn't that Uber intended to ban performance-modified 1969 Dodge Chargers with giant chrome blowers emerging from the hood. It was that Uber aimed to provide a comfortable, safe, convenient, and interchangeable driving experience, and the Charger was none of these things. Comfort and safety weren't standard in 1969, and the Charger was basically what you got when Max Rockatansky's Police Interceptor had a baby with the Dukes of Hazard's Jumping General Lee and that baby was chosen to be the Antichrist. No Uber inspector would pass the Hell Charger.

Eliot Miller drove a standard black four-door 2010 Dodge Charger. Robbie thought this was too specific, that they should borrow a customer's car after a tune-up and bring that to the Uber hub as a stand-in. Eli disagreed. What they needed for their registration was not an actual inspection, but _signed paperwork_ , and for that, all they had to do was steal a blank inspection sheet, forge the inspection notes and signatures, smuggle it into the Uber Hub, and dump it in the hopper on the busiest day of the week. **Any time you want me to step in, just say the word,** Eli remarked as Robbie paced in the lobby of the Hub like a tweaker, working up the nerve to blunder into the inspector's office while pretending to look for a bathroom.

_You just want an excuse to murder somebody,_ Robbie snarled inwardly.

**A bribe was my other idea. But you were all, Oh, Gabe! Gabbie's meds! Pinch those pennies! Murder** _**would** _ **be cheap, but I can take a hint, boy.**

* * *

 

After all that, Robbie Reyes was the proud owner of an Uber registration code that authorized Eliot Miller to drive people around the city in a 2010 Charger, and a sticker to affix to the right rear passenger window.

Putting on the sticker was the hardest part. Robbie got out a ruler, a level, and a chip of soap to draw with so the sticker would be perfectly straight, but it still took six tries to bring himself to roll it on. The sticker left everyone—Robbie, Eli, and the car—with an itchy, used feeling. Circling the car, seeing that bold squared-off U in the window where before had been a glossy tinted void, gave Robbie a touch of nausea.

The next morning, at eight AM after seeing Gabe off at the bus that took him to the Development Center for the day, Robbie turned on the app and waited for a ping.

**There we are. Eliot Miller, five stars. All spanking shiny.**

“What's got you in such a good mood,” Robbie muttered, staring down at his Android.

**Oh...I just think it'll be good for you, to be exposed to a complete cross-section of society every day.**

Robbie ground his teeth. Drummed his fingers on the table. He'd just left the phone on the kitchen table to retrieve one of his GED books when the app chimed. There was a ride request, “Brandon,” a rider with 4.8 stars waiting across the freeway at a Best Western.

**Take it! Take it! Take it! I bet he tips in twenties and his farts smell like gardenias!**

Robbie accepted the ping. Then he threw on his leather jacket, dashed out the door, and drove away in a screech of rubber.

They made it through the underpass and into the parking lot of the Best Western in about five minutes because Robbie drove like every outing was practice for his next street race, and cars had a tendency to duck into the slow lane when they saw that giant blower looming in their rear-view mirror. He pulled up to the lobby, but there was no one in sight. He called the rider.

“Hi. Uhh...Brandon?”

“Dude! Lucky you're here, I was just about to call another ride!”

“Well, I made it. I'm at the lobby, where are you?”

“Oh, just gimme a minute.” It sounded like the passenger's mouth was full. Robbie got out and waited, standing beside the car and watching the lobby through the big glass doors. A tall chubby white guy in a navy suit emerged, towing a roller bag and a briefcase. He stopped to drop a napkin in a nearby trash can, then turned and spotted the Charger. His entire face stretched in glee. “Holy shit, is this a prank?”

“No, sir.”

Robbie opened the trunk and looked down at the pile of chains and jumper cables that sat over the spare tire. Probably should have put those somewhere else. The car didn't even need a spare tire or jumper cables anymore. He sparked up the car, just enough that he could feel the life in it, and ported everything away to his bedroom floor, a little pool of fire and darkness swallowing it up. By the time Brandon got there with his bags, there was nothing but a faint smoke, like firecrackers.

“This really isn't a prank?” Brandon demanded, gazing at the car with wide eyes.

Robbie hefted the bags in and laid them neatly in the spotless trunk. “No, sir. **Be a shame to let this classic waste away in some garage.** ” _Fuck off. Why are you doing this?_

“You're not gonna film me and put me on Youtube?”

“No, sir. Where to?”

“LAX.” Brandon pulled out his phone and showed Robbie the address. Robbie entered it into his map and looked at the new route, then swung himself back into the driver's seat. Brandon yanked fruitlessly on the passenger door. “Dude? Locks?”

_Shit._ Robbie twitched up the passenger lock with a thought. Brandon didn't notice, just heaved the door open and crashed in, his bulk making the car tilt on its shocks in a way that gave Robbie and Eli the heebie-jeebies. **He's gonna slam my door.** Clunk. **He slammed my fuckin' door!**

“Jesus, it's hot in here. How are you not dead?”

“You can roll the windows down.”

“Don't mind if I do. You don't have air-con?”

“Just a heater.”

They peeled out through the parking lot and merged onto the arterial, heading toward the freeway. As soon as they got up the westbound onramp, Robbie poured on the gas and started weaving through traffic. The whistling scream of the blower and the growl of the engine drowned out anything Brandon might have had to say, aside from periodic hoots and squeals. Every time they accelerated, the front end rose up on its shocks. Brandon braced himself on the dash and the window. The Charger didn't have any interior handles to grip.

LA traffic was what it was, however, and without doing anything obviously supernatural they were inevitably forced to stop. The V-8 rumbled discontentedly, entrapped by cars on all sides on a bridge over a spill-way.

“You got any water?” Brandon asked, sweating.

“No, sir.”

Brandon loosened his tie and undid his shirt collar. “So where're you from?”

“Hillrock Heights. It's a, a spot in East LA. Little neighborhood.”

“No, I mean. Where're you _from?_ ”

“LA.”

“I mean, where're your _parents_ from?”

“LA. I think.”

“You think?”

**Hhrmmm.** Robbie got a mental flash of pounding the pointy end of a body hammer through Brandon's temple.

“Where're _you_ from?” Robbie snapped, his eyes heating.

“Kansas City.” Brandon fiddled with the latch of the glove box, where the salvage title Canelo had finagled for him under his real name sat, and also one of Gabe's action figures. Robbie panicked. The latch sparked up. Brandon jerked his hand away and sucked on his fingers. “Ow, fuck!”

“ **Sorry, all this horsepower throws a lotta heat. Heh-heh.** ”

“No kidding. I got a new respect for guys who actually drive these old things around.”

Eli revved the engine and popped the clutch while applying the hand-brake, a maneuver that was physically painful to the car but shot them forward six inches, laying down two smears of rubber and jolting Brandon violently in his seat. Then he handed Robbie his body back as suddenly as he'd shoved him out. Robbie stared ahead at the frozen line of cars, dry-mouthed.

“Jesus. Sor- _ry,_ ” Brandon said.

**You gotta get him on the back foot. Project dominance! You're driving this car, if you don't like him you can crash him right into a retaining wall!**

Robbie shook his head hard. “So what do you do in Kansas City, Brandon?”

“Insurance adjuster.”

“Yeah?” **He's the asshole in charge of cheating people out of their insurance payouts!**

“Yeah. I investigate claims. Make sure everything's by the book. Pretty dull, but, you know. It's a living. Company sent me here for a conference.”

“Cool.”

Robbie ground his teeth and gripped the wheel so hard his driving gloves creaked while Brandon rambled about his office drama and how subrogation worked. The traffic in front of them slowly, slowly unraveled, and they reached LAX in half an hour. They got lost getting to the pick-up area, because Eli insisted he knew every terminal at the airport but he'd died before 9-11 and was blind-sided by the security-related changes to vehicle traffic. At last they reached one of the new pickup/drop off areas. Robbie found himself in a long line of newer, legitimate Uber vehicles.

“Hey, I didn't tell you my joke,” Brandon said as they pulled up to the concrete pad.

Robbie thumped the steering wheel with his thumbs.

“Why did the almost-blind guy fall into the well?”

“ _Huh?_ ”

“The almost-blind guy. Why did the almost-blind guy fall into the well. C'mon.”

Robbie stared at him. Brandon was loud. He wore an obnoxious cologne. He could feel the sweat of Brandon's ass on the leather where Gabe usually sat, and he'd left fingerprints on his window. Brandon's mouth hung half-open in a little grin as he waited for Robbie to answer.

**Because he couldn't** _**see that well.** _ **Heh-hah-haaah! Okay, that's worth half of this ride.**

Robbie groaned. He yanked the hand-break, stomped out of the car, and hauled Brandon's bags out.

“Thanks for the ride, dude,” Brandon said, and tipped him a buck.

“No problem. Have a safe trip home,” Robbie muttered. He collapsed back into the driver's seat.

The phone chimed, prompting him to give Brandon a star rating.

**Ooh, lessee, lessee,** Eli chuckled. **Minus three stars for slamming my door. Minus two for whining. Minus FIVE for butting up in your business, and minus one for bad tipping. Plus two for the joke, makes NEGATIVE NINE STARS. Put that in.**

Robbie gave Brandon three stars, then changed his mind and made it four. He looked at the sweaty imprint Brandon had left in his seat, and bumped it down to three again. Hit enter. Waited for another ping.

A car behind him trying to get to the drop-off pad honked impatiently, and Robbie's tailpipe spat fire as he sped away.

 

* * *

 

Robbie carried Linda from a Holiday Inn to LAX. He carried Miguel from an office building to another office building. He carried Hank, Sara, and five-year-old Meaghen from LAX to a Red Lion Inn. He carried Trisha from the Red Lion Inn to a Hyatt Regency. He carried Pete from a run-down house in the suburbs to a slightly nicer house in another suburb, then a boarded-up motor home in a trailer park, and then a generically grandiose house in a hilltop gated community, and then a street corner in the warehouse district, and then back to the boarded-up motor home, and then to another generically grandiose hill-top house. Pete was the politest of his riders, and tipped Robbie twenty bucks. Robbie gave him five stars when he dropped him off back in the suburbs.

Finally it was time to pick up a short shift at Canelo's. Robbie shut the app down, screeched into the parking lot, slammed his locker shut on his leather jacket, threw on his cover-alls, and spent the rest of the day flat on his back on a creeper, churning through oil-lube-and-filters and not talking to anyone. Eli was quiet, too, if smug. Robbie took what he could get.

He wished Canelo had more hours for him, but his boss seemed to be arranging things so that Robbie and the new mechanic, Ramón “El Perro Rabioso” Cordova, shared as few shifts as possible. Ramón, while in prison for multiple axe-murders, had somehow as good as earned ASE certification in electrical systems and automatic transmission servicing. Whatever. If Canelo wanted to give Robbie's hours to Ramón, Ramón could keep them. Canelo didn't even pay on time.

But today when he left for home, Robbie had two hundred dollars in the bank already. Nothing like driving home from a two minute race with five grand in his pocket, but it beat the alternatives. And the Hell Charger didn't even need gas.

He met Gabe when the bus pulled up. Mrs. Valenzuela helped him down the steps; he was still soldiering on with his crutches, but his head drooped and he moved much slower than he had this morning.

“Whoa, buddy,” Robbie said, hustling over to steady him.

“I can do it,” Gabe snapped.

Robbie backed off a step, startled.

“He used his crutches all day,” Mrs. Valenzuela said. “You worked very hard and I'm very proud of you. Your brother is also very proud of you.”

“Yeah, Gabe, I'm so proud.”

Gabe's head was low, and his arms shook in the cuffs of his crutches.

“But you're home now, Gabriel. You don't have to work so hard.”

“I'm not tired,” Gabe insisted. He looked like he had low blood sugar. He looked gray. He looked like he was coming off a seizure, back before they'd found a combination of seizure meds that worked for him.

Robbie knelt. “Let me give you a ride to the house.” Gabe lifted his head with obvious effort. “I missed you, buddy. C'mon. I'll be Optimus Prime.”

“Robbie?” That frantic, searching look.

“Yeah. Or I can be a shark and you can be Aquaman.”

“Can you be Robbie?”

“Yeah, I can be just Robbie.”

Gabe stumbled at him and collapsed against his shoulder with a huff. Robbie helped him out of his crutches and helped Gabe wrap his arms around his neck and his legs around his waist, stood, and headed off to the house. “Bye, Mrs. Valenzuela!” Gabe hollered, suddenly his old self, as the bus drove off.

“So how was school?” Robbie asked, steady under the familiar warmth of Gabe on his back as they sauntered back to the Reyes house.

“Good. How was Robbie's school?”

“I, uh, I'm finishing school early. All I do is read books now. I have a new job instead.”

Gabe gripped him tighter. “Job?”

“It's a different job. I can stop whenever I want to, so I can spend more time with you. Whenever you're not in school, we can read books, or play ninjas-and-autobots, or cook, or clean the house, or whatever we want. Sounds good, right?”

“Can I come with to your job?”

_I wish._ Robbie let them into the house. “I'll put you in your chair, okay?”

“What's your job like?”

He carried Gabe down the hall to his room, where the power chair was. “I drive people around in our car when they need rides.”

“That's so nice, Robbie!” Gabe peeled off and settled into the chair. There were red rub marks on his forearms from the cuffs of the crutches. “You're super nice.”

Robbie scratched the back of his neck. “They pay me money. And they—they ask for help. See, it's okay to ask for help. Everybody needs help sometimes.”

 

* * *

 

**Wake up, boy.**

Two A.M. on a Tuesday. Robbie lay curled on his side, drooling into his pillow. It was becoming autumn and the house had cooled sometime around midnight; the blankets, oppressive earlier in the night, now lay uselessly over his shins as he shivered in his sleep.

**Up.**

Robbie reached down and yanked up the blankets. Now his feet were bare. He rolled into a ball.

**There you are. Get up.**

_Fuck off._

On the street, the Charger's engine revved on its own. Robbie jerked like he'd been burned. The blankets went flying.

**Heh-heh. What'd you expect?**

Robbie panted, heart racing uncontrollably, his skull hot beneath his skin. _What'dya want?_

**Our deal.**

He swallowed. _Our deal?_

**You and me, we gotta whack somebody. Rub 'em out. Shove 'em off this mortal coil. Gank. Terminate. I'm a satanic serial killer and my bloodlust must be appeased.**

_I hate you._ Robbie rolled himself back into the blankets.

**Boy, I am completely serious. You gave me your word that you would help me kill people as long as they fit your exacting criteria. Like Mr. Raper T. Raperson. I've left your defective brother completely alone, but you have not held up your end of the deal. Scumbags you insist on, you won't bump into randomly on the street. You have to track them down. And since you refuse to help me with the research, you are going to sit in the car and listen to police chatter.**

The engine revved again, outside; Eli's spirit both within Robbie's head and welded into two tons of Detroit steel, teasing the gas pedal, dragging at him, stirring him up. Robbie snarled into his pillow. His breath steamed. Saliva boiled and crackled under his tongue.

_Fine._

He rolled out of bed, threw on some clothes, and stomped out to the car. The door opened.

**You ever notice that little lever that sticks out under the radio?**

Robbie hadn't. Flush with the center console sat a little chrome switch. He had to dig under it with his fingernails to grip it. It turned stiffly. Probably hadn't been used since Eli had died. The car sparked up a little and the radio turned on, but instead of the hip-hop station it played static, long soft static. Then a woman's voice, bored, quick, sharply enunciated. A series of numerical codes. A location, by mile marker, on highway 110.

**Traffic stop. Try another channel, there should be at least five.**

Robbie adjusted the tuner. More codes, which turned out to be another traffic stop. A noise complaint—no detail. Could have been a party blasting the sound system or a screaming match in the street. He wondered what he would do if he happened to overhear the cops in pursuit of a suspect. He could catch up with them in the Charger—Eli knew how to open portals wherever they wanted when they were the Ghost Rider—and they could beat the cops to the suspect, vanish him away, and then...what? Wrap him in chains and send him to Hell? Let Eli carve him up and make pentagrams with his intestines? Who deserved for that to happen to them?

Well, Eli, for one. Robbie knew for a fact that people who deserved to be murdered and tortured existed, because one of them lived in his head, too deep for him to reach in and tear out. But he remembered the night he'd, well, died. The moment a helicopter's searchlight stabbed down through his windshield, whiting out the road and blinding him. The terror of facing prison and leaving Gabe to face the foster system alone. And then, after he'd bolted like a rabbit through the grid of blocks and back alleys and found himself cornered, his pursuers closing in on him, he remembered the betrayal he'd felt when they proved themselves to be something worse than the law. When they'd opened fire on him and the car, left him shattered and drowning in his own blood.

That was what Eli wanted him to do to someone else.

Robbie reclined in the driver's seat while Eli listened to the radio. His phone dug into his hip, so he pulled it out. Woke it up. He thumbed on the Uber app and immediately got a ping. It was just four blocks away, and there was even a note, “Surge: 2x.” That meant double fares. The passenger was “Ramón,” 4.5 stars, Hillrock Heights near the I-5 on-ramp.

“Gotta go,” Robbie announced, answering the ping. He flicked the switch back to civilian radio, started up the car for real, and screeched off.

As he gunned the motor and drifted through empty street corners and shifted gears up and down to optimize his torque at all speeds, he noticed some of the neatly-kept ranch houses and boxwood hedges and tilting power poles looked familiar. He remembered when he'd last come this way when he almost drove the Charger down a twelve-foot wide crater in the asphalt. A giant purple alien goo monster had dug that crater when it popped up to terrorize the neighborhood; the only reason he'd even been around for the goo monster was that Robbie had happened to come here to confront his new ex-con coworker, Ramón Cordova.

This same Ramón, El Rabioso himself, waited politely at the sidewalk a dozen yards away from the crater.

Imagine Half-Dome Butte stuffed into a collared shirt. A coyote riding in a handbag. A fully-armed tank waiting its turn to merge onto a packed-frozen freeway. Ramón stood six foot two and bulged with muscle. He kept his head shaved almost to the crown, had a tattoo that read RABIOSO in swirling Gothic capitals around the back of his skull, a smaller tattoo of a dagger under one eye, and a long winding scar just missing the other. He wore the kind of reading glasses you picked up for ten bucks at the drug store, and he buttoned his neatly pressed shirts all the way to the throat.

Robbie slowed to a crawl. Ramón had spotted him as soon as he'd rounded the corner; he saw him raise one eyebrow as he spotted the Uber sticker in the window. He saw him shrug, pocket his phone, and lean down to the front passenger window.

Robbie leaned across and cranked the window down.

“'Eliot?'” Ramón asked, monotone.

“Y-yeah,” Robbie said. He cleared his throat. “Ramón, right?”

Ramón snorted dismissively. “I have one other rider in the house. I'll get him. Okay?”

“Yeah, fine.”

Robbie drummed his thumbs on the wheel while Ramón stalked, straight-backed, to a nearby house. He was gone inside for at least two minutes. At last he emerged, trailed by a shorter, stockier man, with gray stubble, a stained T-shirt, and a sagging, loaded black back-pack.

Robbie stepped out of the car so he could fold down the passenger bucket seat and the second man could get in with his bag. Ramón sat stiffly in the front, hands on his knees. “All set?” Robbie asked.

Ramón nodded and jerked his chin forward. Robbie checked his phone. The address on the app was twenty miles away in L.A. proper, not one of the famous parts. Robbie started the meter and drove off, while Eli rambled in the back of his head.

**That Ramón. Such a hypocritical stickler. Who's he to say you can't bring your brother to work with you? Little guy coulda been like mechanic Rain Man. The other guys loved having him visit the shop. Now, pfizzzzh! That future's up in smoke. Who's he to meddle in your business? Turn Canelo against you?**

“Pedro. Buckle up,” Ramón told the man in the back. Pedro had a sharp smell of sweat, and he was trembling against the back seat. He fumbled to find the lap belt, expand it, and snap it shut, and as soon as he finished, he clutched his bag back to his chest.

**Guilty,** Eli purred. Robbie cut a glance into the rear-view mirror. In the passing streetlights, he saw beads of sweat on Pedro's balding forehead. **What's he doing running with the mad dog here? What's he let Rabioso rope him into?**

_How about we take a detour up into the hills and light them on fire, that's what you're getting at. Right?_

**It's like you know me.**

_Stop._

**I don't see you coming up with any better ideas.**

They approached the onramp and Robbie downshifted and stomped on the gas, the supercharger squealing and the motor propelling them violently from twenty to eighty miles per hour. For a second, as they merged onto the near-empty freeway, he felt like he was flying. Pedro made a strangled cry.

**Pedro is the guiltiest-looking bitch I ever saw,** Eli continued, undeterred, as they roared toward the interchange onto Highway 60. **El Rabioso, now, he's got two expressions, bored and angry. Pedro's more your average fresh-meat. No poker face. He's just made the worst mistake of his life tonight and he's expecting Rabioso to fix it.**

Robbie eyed him in the mirror again as he dodged around a semi-truck. That bulging back-pack.

**Guns, maybe,** Eli mused. **Or severed hands, feet, and head. Cut those off and hide them good, and unless there's previously documented tattoos, they'll never identify the rest of the body.**

_Okay._

**Okay! Let's unleash hellfire on their asses!** The car warmed and the dials began to flare orange as Eli woke their sleeping power. Robbie clamped down against it.

_Okay you convinced me they're probably up to no good and we need to figure out what that is!_ Robbie snarled in his head, teeth grinding.

Neither of his passengers spoke a word the entire trip, leaving Robbie completely in the dark as they left the freeway and jigged and jagged through sinister industrial blocks until they reached a lurid LED sign bright enough to light the street for a quarter mile. REBIRTH, it read, beneath an animation of a bright yellow butterfly morphing into a yellow flower. Electronica buzzed and pounded, a baseline thrumming through the Charger's tires as they rolled over the asphalt. People in short, sparkly clothes trickled out the doors in pairs and clusters, laughing and stumbling.

“We're here,” Ramón announced. Pedro made no sign he'd heard. “Pedro. Vamanos.”

Pedro sucked down air, jolting in his seat as though attempting to stand. He unbuckled his seat-belt and shoved at the back of Ramón's seat, even though Robbie was still cruising, looking for a spot to park.

“Pedro,” Ramón said again, twisting around. “Get a grip. Don't panic in front of Anita.”

Robbie gave up on parking and stopped the car in the street. “Leave the meter running,” Ramón told him, and he got out and folded down the passenger seat to let Pedro out. He and Pedro quick-marched into REBIRTH. Robbie waited, staring indecisively up at the cinderblock monolith. He listened for anything: screams, gunshots. Wondered if Ghost Rider needed to come blazing through the wall, chains and hooks swinging.

**Time's wasting! Stop them!**

_Who's Anita?_

**Their boss? Their target? Who cares!**

One thumping, buzzing dance beat blended into another. Minutes passed by and Robbie's 2x surge fare ticked upward, until four figures emerged from the club: Ramón, Pedro, a bouncer in a black shirt that said Security on it, and a smaller person completely muffled in a fuzzy blanket. Ramón shook hands with the bouncer, while Pedro and the blanket shuffled toward Robbie's car. The blanket stumbled, and Pedro gripped it by the shoulders. It screamed shrilly. “Don't _touch_ me!”

“Mija!” Pedro cried, hands spread. “Anita! It's papá!”

Anita threw off the blanket. She was tiny, just a kid, maybe younger than Robbie. Smeared makeup made her eyes black pits. Her hair drooped in snarled clumps from where she'd once piled it on top of her head. A rose-gold sequined miniskirt blazed in the light of the club's front sign. Slender gunmetal chains were sewn into her green tank top as a fringe; some of them, torn loose, dangled free below her waist. She stared blankly into the dark. Looked back at the sign, then covered her eyes. “Papá?”

“Mija!”

She bolted toward Pedro and tripped over the blanket in her bare feet. “What's happening to me?”

Ramón returned to Pedro's shoulder as he steadied Anita. “You're at a nightclub downtown. You took something. Your father's here to take you home.”

Anita shoved herself away from them. “I don't _know_ you.”

“Anita, that's my friend Ramón, remember? I just introduced you. He helped me find you.”

“Papá?”

“Yes, cariña.” He opened the backpack he still carried over one shoulder. It was smaller now: the blanket must have taken up most of it. He opened a bottle of Gatorade and handed it to her. “It's the blue kind. Your favorite.”

Anita leaned away. “There's a worm around it.”

“No, no. There's no worm.” Pedro took a sip from the bottle and passed it back to her. Anita dumped it on the ground.

“You got germs on it.”

Pedro got out another Gatorade.

“We're wasting time. Let's move,” Ramón said.

They approached the car, abandoning the blanket on the tarmac. Robbie hurried to lay the passenger seat down. Pedro and Anita didn't look much alike, but their slightly prominent ears, the set of their eyes, the subtle arc of their noses marked them undeniably related.

“I can't go in that car,” Anita announced when Pedro started to guide her into the back seat.

“We have to get you home, cariña.”

“I don't want that car! It's dark!”

“It's okay,” Pedro said, climbing in. Anita covered her eyes, moaning. “See, I'm okay. Get in, Nita. Papá's here.”

Ramón scooped Anita up and swung her, carefully but not gently, into the back. Then he unfolded the front seat, trapping her in the car. Anita shrieked.

“Está bién, está bién. Papá's here.”

She settled, squinting at him in the dark. “Papá?”

“Anita. Let me help you with your seatbelt.”

“I can _do_ it.”

Anita could not do it. It took nearly five minutes for Pedro to get her seatbelt on for her, because she kept looking for the belt at her shoulder instead of her lap, and pushing his hands away. Finally Anita was secure. Ramón got in. Robbie started the car back up and Anita started screaming.

Ramón rolled his window down to let some of the noise out.

“What is it? What's wrong?” Pedro demanded.

“Monster! There's a monster!”

“It's just the engine. A really big engine,” Pedro shushed her. “There's no monster here.”

Anita made a long, keening cry, clutching her ears. “ _What is happening to me?!_ ”

Robbie waited, frozen, right hand on the shifter. _Eli, whatever you're doing, stop._

**That's not me, that's chemistry.**

“Drive,” said Ramón.

Robbie put the car in gear and roared off. Anita started that deafening wail again, and, following Ramón's idea, Robbie rolled down his own window. Anita was right behind him, and she kicked and struck at the back of his seat as they moved. When they hit the freeway, Robbie rolled his window most of the way up, and the noise of the wind drowned out some of the engine sound. Anita abruptly stopped flailing.

“Papá, I don't feel good,” she said.

“I know, darling.”

Robbie glanced back in the rear-view mirror, saw that she had slumped into Pedro's shoulder and he was stroking her snarled hair.

“I think I'm dehydrated.”

“Drink.”

She pushed the Gatorade away, sloshing it on Robbie's seats. “There's something wrong with me. Why am I in this car?”

“It's a friend's car. We're going back to the house.” Pedro pressed a kiss to her forehead. Frowned. “You're so warm.”

“I feel dehydrated.”

“Ramón, she's burning up.”

Ramón turned around suddenly in his seat and pulled a pen-light out of his breast pocket. He reached back. “Give me your arm.”

“I don't _know_ you,” Anita snapped.

“I'm a friend of your father's. Give me your arm.”

Anita reached out for him, and Ramón wrapped his big, crooked fingers around her slender forearm and wrist. Shined the pen-light in her eyes. He grunted. “Reyes. Take the next exit.”

Robbie nodded, changed lanes. He wasn't sure where that would put them; he wasn't familiar with this part of the city.

“What's wrong?” Pedro asked, still fruitlessly trying to get Anita to sip Gatorade.

“She's shaking. Pulse is weak. Whatever she took, it wasn't just acid. She needs to go to the hospital.”

Robbie skidded around the curve of the next off-ramp, stopped in the center turn lane, and located the nearest emergency room on his phone. With the new route set, he swung and reversed through a T-turn and sped off.

They made it to the ER ten minutes later. Ramón and Robbie got out so that Pedro and Anita could get out. As Pedro shepherded Anita through the doors, Ramón paused. “You like pork or lengua?”

“Huh?” Robbie clicked the passenger seat back into place.

“In your tamales. I got pork and I got tongue.”

“Oh, uh.” He hadn't had tongue since his mom...since Mom. “Pork, I guess.”

“I'll bring some to the shop. Thursday.” Ramón took out his phone and ended the trip; Robbie's phone chimed seconds later. “For your tip. I'm sorry, but I can't pay rent in tamales.”

“No, no, that sounds...great,” Robbie said, wrong-footed. “You don't want a ride home? I mean, I live so close...”

“No, I'll stay with Pedro and his kid.”

“You have a morning shift.”

Ramón gave him a look. Robbie threw up his hands, slid into the car. “Hey. Reyes.”

Robbie paused, one hand on the keyes. Ramón leaned down and peered into the open passenger window.

“About your brother.”

Robbie's nostrils flared and he started the car.

“Some of the guys came to me about him. I'll tell you what I told them.”

“Nnn.”

“I was too harsh with him and I lost my temper. I'm sorry for that.”

Robbie's eyes heated, stung. His vision blurred, not with tears, but with steam. “Okay.”

“I once saw a man decapitated by a scissor lift,” Ramón continued. “Our job is hazardous and it's no place for a child.”

Robbie didn't trust himself to open his mouth. His own saliva crackled under his tongue and his lungs filled with fumes and steam.

“I'll make enough tamales for you to take home, how's that,” Ramón said, and headed off into the hospital.

Robbie slammed the car into gear and left streaks of melting rubber at the ER entryway. In the lot, he had to stop abruptly as a limousine pulled a wide turn into the driveway, and his chest heaved, breath smoking, drooling sparks. _Eli, help, I can't transform until we get away from the cameras,_ he thought, as the engine growled through the frame and through his throat.

**No, not the cameras,** Eli said sarcastically. But the fires slowed, leaving Robbie hovering on the edge of living and dead, his tongue and sinuses all charred and hollowed away, sparking coals for eyes, the steering wheel hot as agony under his gloved hands. The limousine passed by, and Robbie snorted a breath full of fire, screeched back into gear, and tore away into traffic. He let the change blast through him, his whole body flaring with pain until the flesh boiled away, and then it was just them and the car, a single creature of bone and fire and leather and steel, and rage. Ghost Rider roared incoherently as the car streaked through the dark streets, the hot wind of their passage rocking streetlights, buffeting the people who crept through the city on secret errands in the dark, making glass windows and razor-wire fences sing.

The city stifled them.

_Get us out of here,_ Robbie demanded, and under their blazing headlights a great black fire-ringed hole opened in the road before them. Ghost Rider charged through the portal, dropping into the void. They emerged into moonlight, and their tires skidded for traction in the coarse sand of the Sierra Nevada foothills.

They burned against the mountainside like wildfire, great tongues and streaks of flame and molten iron streaming from every light, from the blower that sucked air like a devouring wind, from the gaps between the Ghost's teeth and the vents in their face-plate. They down-shifted and carved through the sand, drifting until they pointed straight to the nearest hill-top, and then they roared upward.

Rocks and dips jerked the front tires from side to side; a light hand on the wheel let them weave their way up the steep grade, leaving streaks of ghost-fire for a thousand yards. Taller obstacles, the front bumper destroyed: boulders shattered, manzanita shrubs vaporized into spirals of flame. They climbed higher, steeper, thirty degrees, forty, sixty. Their momentum was all that kept their tires in contact with the rocky slope. Suddenly they ran out of hill and soared, weightless, into the air, the engine and blower still snarling, Ghost Rider roaring their frustration.

Robbie let himself melt into the seat, dissolve into the steel and fire of the car. He needed the cool night air on his skin. The moment stretched, infinite: each turn of their free-spinning tires was like a breath, each turn of the crankshaft like a heartbeat. He could see, in the front-and-back way the car saw, a pueblo-styled house with a high fence on the hilltop beneath them, and a man with a rifle staring up at them in astonishment. Their fires cast harsh shadows on his puffy face, and the rifle looked slender, toy-like.

Ghost Rider flowed out of the roof of the car, like standing up out of shallow water. The full moon shone cool and perfect down on them, and the fire that streamed from the car's every opening punched up to meet it, brighter than search-lights. There was a chain in the Rider's hands, and they whirled it in great arcs as they surfed through their descent, lashing the air with glowing steel, heat waves stretching and spiraling in their path, as though they could pour out all their rage and drown the whole mountain. They spat sparks and molten steel as they roared.

Robbie half-hoped the man with the gun would fire on them as the car rolled end-over-end. But he never did. Their wheels struck the slope on the opposite end of the hill and they streaked off, higher into the mountains, chasing the moon.

 

* * *

 

Ramón kept his word Thursday and brought to the auto shop a plastic shopping bag loaded with six tamales tightly rolled in cling wrap and chilled with a frozen water bottle, along with instructions to reheat them.

**Poison.**

_Fuck off._

They had each, for some reason, given each-other a five star Uber review the other day. Today Ramón nodded politely at Robbie whenever they crossed paths. They didn't have to keep it up for long; Ramón's shift ended a couple hours after Robbie's began. Until Ramón went home, Canelo kept darting out of his office as though they were about to start swinging wrenches at any moment.

Robbie was busy from the minute he put on his coveralls, with a collision repair on a '99 Oldsmobile that ended up taking all day. He was assisting Alejo, which usually ensured an interesting day's work.

Alejo was the oldest mechanic at the shop, and the best welder and body-worker by a wide margin. His welds were invisible, but you could jump up and down on them. By the time he finished hammering out dents, you'd swear the sheet metal was ready for primer—but then he'd apply a whisper of fiberglass filler, so thin it was translucent, and start sanding. He was fast, efficient, precise. Robbie had attached himself to Alejo years ago when he'd first started working at the shop, because auto body repair was one field that didn't just boil down to “read the manual before starting.” And Alejo, to his credit, treated Robbie more like a fellow mechanic and parent than like a kid or a moveable bench clamp. He talked as he worked, which made it easier for Robbie to pick up on what he was doing, and didn't make Robbie feel patronized.

The Olds needed an alignment job after the collision, which at Canelo's was handled the old-fashioned way, with steel rods clamped to the tires and levels and measuring tape, because the wheel alignment machine didn't turn on anymore. The front wheels were toed in nearly an inch after the crash, while according to the manual, the proper toe-in was closer to 1/16 th  inch. The hardest part was getting the bolts loosened. The undercarriage had the most horrifying case of corrosion Robbie had ever seen, and he had to get out the hammer and chisel twice because the bolts shrugged off the torque of a four-foot breaker-bar and laughed at him.

“This car's come from way up north,” Alejo remarked, peeking down. “I guarantee it. It's the road salt, does this to them. Moving to L.A.'s the best thing that ever happened to her.”

When Robbie finally got the tie-rods loosened and started adjusting, he looked up to watch Alejo pounding on the Olds' crumpled front quarter panel, one hand pressing out from inside the wheel well with the heavy dolly wrapped in a shop cloth as an anvil, the other hammering, now sharp and now soft, with the fat end of a body hammer. Now and then he reversed the hammer, giving a laser-focused _pick_ right on the crest of a fold with the pointy end.

Robbie remembered driving the pointy end of his own hammer through a man's ankle, while he and Eli were the Ghost Rider. It had been last month. The last human-trafficking operation they'd found.

“You read the dents,” Alejo yelled over the noise of the shop. “You've got to see the folds in your mind, run them back and forth through time, until you're pretty sure which fold came first. Then you got to flatten them, in reverse order. Otherwise you'll make more of a mess, the metal won't want to follow because you'll be stretching it, see? You have to work with the damage. Don't start with the deepest fold and work out.” Between the hammer and dolly, the quarter panel gradually relaxed, regained its globoid, nineties curve. “Everything I can push-hammer, I'll do. Then I'll get the stud-welder, bring out the pull-hammer. You can do that, my elbow's giving me trouble. How far out is that alignment?”

“Ten minutes, maybe,” Robbie said.

“I'll work-up an estimate for repairing the rust-through in the mean time.” He jerked the hammer at the rear wheel-well. “You notice paint bubbling anywhere else?”

“Opposite wheel-well. Driver's door. And the entire undercarriage is rusted.”

“Well, the client's insurance signed off on the collision repair, but the rust, God only knows. Ay-yi-yi,” Alejo sighed, scratching his head.

Once Robbie got the wheels aligned and the bolts replaced where he'd chiseled them off, Alejo had him grab the stud-welder. This tool used an electric charge to fuse a stud, a bit of steel that resembled a large thumb-tack, directly onto the crumpled quarter-panel. He carefully seated each stud in the exact lowest point of each dent before activating the arc and releasing, leaving a steel disk fused to the panel with a half-inch stud sticking out. He lifted his welding helmet after every few studs, and Alejo waved for him to continue until the entire crumpled area looked like a pincusion. Then he refilled and put away the stud welder, got the pull hammer, and went to work pulling the dents. Again, in reverse order.

The pull-hammer was a long bar with a weighted hand-grip that slid up and down, coming to a sharp stop at the end, and a vice at the tip that bit onto the studs. Slam the hand-grip backward, and the pull-hammer delivered a powerful tug against the welded stud, raising the dent. Robbie was surprised Alejo had let him install the studs this time. Their proper position was absolutely critical—he couldn't just pound wherever he wanted. He slid the hammer, first tentative as he warmed up to it, then more sharply, being careful not to break the studs off the disks, switching from point to point as the quarter panel slowly rose and unfolded toward him. Always took him about three times as long as Alejo did to get it smooth, but he was improving with practice. Alejo was busy feeling and tapping and prodding, mapping out rusted panels to be patched or replaced another day.

“This good?” Robbie hollered, when he started to get diminishing returns.

Alejo returned and squinted at the panel. “Pull these three a few more times, then come back to the middle. Then clip the studs, grind the disks, start mixing your filler.”

With Alejo's advice, the last of the depressions rose smoothly from the panel. Robbie got a pair of wire cutters and an angle grinder, put on his headphones and safety glasses. Blasted bootlegged punk rock from a band that did shows in the parking lot behind the laundromat on Saturdays. He nodded along to the banging and screaming as he worked.

After getting the Olds filled out and sanded and replacing the windshield and re-aligning the passenger door hinges, Robbie made it home to Gabe and got to work reheating Ramón's tamales. Lacking a cookie sheet, he lined the upper rack of the rarely-used oven with tinfoil, and put a saucepan full of water in the lower rack to make steam. Once the oven had preheated, gushing a gout of steam that might have killed a normal person stupid enough to stick their face in it as they opened the door, Robbie lined up the clammy corn-husk bundles on the tinfoil and baked them for ten minutes.

“What are you doing, Robbie?” Gabe asked, watching from across the table in his power chair.

“I'm getting tamales ready. Like Doña Rosa makes.”

“Yay! Robbie made tamales!”

“Not me. A...friend from work gave them to me. I'm making peas.”

“Aw.”

“I know, but we gotta have peas. Can't be the Ice Cream Monster if you don't eat your peas.”

“Butter sauce?”

“Of course, little bro.” On the stove-top, Robbie stirred butter and the contents of three Parmesan cheese packets lifted from the local pizza parlor into a pan of formerly-frozen peas. “Can't have peas without butter sauce.”

Gabe whirled his power chair in a circle. Where he'd once had red marks on his forearms where his crutches rubbed, now he had darker bands of skin with a scale of dander. Robbie wished he'd take his chair to school. Gabe's muscle relaxants helped him get his legs under him, but he inevitably got tired, put too much strain on his arms. He worried. He wasn't about to force Gabe to take the chair; after all, the school had regular wheelchairs and Gabe could wheel himself around just fine on level ground.

The tamales had just started to produce an unsettlingly nostalgic aroma of corn and chiles when someone knocked at the door.

Robbie shut off the stove and the oven. “Gabe, it's time to wash your hands for dinner,” he said.

“Somebody at the door!” Gabe crowed. “Robbie, somebody at the door!”

“Thanks, buddy. I'm going to see who it is. Can you wash your hands so you're ready to eat?”

Gabe buzzed around the table to the sink. “Yeah! I have soap! I have a water faucet! I can wash my hands!”

Robbie patted him on the shoulder and stalked to the door, one hand twitching. He uncovered the peephole.

Lisa was outside. Robbie and Eli were so stir-crazy they'd been half-hoping for a dozen gun-toting thugs at the door. Instead it was Robbie's old classmate Lisa, her make-up crisp, delicate dangly earrings flashing, strawberry hair set off by a stylishly slouchy knit cap.

He hadn't seen Lisa since he'd dropped out of school. She was—almost? Technically? Aspirationally?—his first girlfriend. Robbie had had little interest in girls compared to other kids his age, because he was too preoccupied about money. Lisa should have been way out of his league—gorgeous, nice family, good grades, nice clothes, never in trouble—except she seemed to prefer a man who was hard to get. She'd invited herself into his house by asking his help with calculus, and then informed him, gently but firmly, that they should date. Robbie never got the chance to form much of an opinion about this because at the time Eli was doing the best he could to destroy every last pillar of Robbie's sanity starting with Gabe, and Lisa understandably freaked out and hadn't come back since.

Robbie opened the door. She had a plate of cookies in her hands, a warm buttery smell escaping the plastic wrap.

“Hi,” Robbie said cautiously.

“Hi, Robbie,” Lisa replied. She had a nice smile that she wore for nearly all occasions, and she was wearing it now. Though sincere, it was practiced and deliberate. Robbie fought the urge to check the state of the house behind him. The house was clean. Had to be, with a wheelchair user. He heard Gabe shut the water off in the sink, and yell, “Towel!” narrating his actions the way he did when he was in a good mood.

“So, Robbie,” said Lisa, in her deliberately cheerful fashion. “I haven’t seen you for a while, and I thought I’d come by to see how you guys were doing. I hope that’s okay?”

Lisa was one of the most positive people Robbie had ever met. Not that she was in denial about Hillrock Heights and its social and economic disadvantages, but more that she had decided long ago to treat everyone she met with all the kindness that their unrealized best self deserved. It made Robbie’s gut churn that he detected a note of concern in her tone today.

**She’s checking up on you, boy.**

Robbie scratched the back of his neck. “Yeah, of course. We’ve been…great. Better. Gabe’s in the kitchen, if you want to see him, we were just sitting down for dinner. There’s chairs. Are those cookies?” he asked, pointing at the cookies.

“You haven’t had dinner yet? I’m sorry, I would’ve brought something—”

“It’s fine, we’ve got plenty—”

“I just ate—”

“One of the guys from work tipped me in tamales.”

“They smell really good. I thought maybe I could bring a movie?”

Gabe buzzed out of the kitchen, waving one arm. “Clean hands!” He saw Lisa in the door and stopped abruptly. The last time they'd seen each-other he hadn’t really been himself and it hadn’t gone well. Robbie wasn’t sure how well Gabe remembered those days, back when Eli had been test driving his other nephew to be his murderous meat puppet. Surly had been a weird look on Gabe.

“Thanks for washing up, buddy. You remember Lisa?”

“Yeah,” Gabe said, subdued.

“Hi, Gabe!” Lisa called, waving. She squatted down on her heels, which was unnecessary but at least less irritating than bending down with her hands on her knees. “I brought cookies and a movie for you guys. Do you like cookies?”

“Not raisins,” Gabe said.

“No raisins. They have white chocolate and cranberries.”

“What’s cranberries?”

“Cranberries are a berry that grows in the water. People make them into a jelly that you eat with turkey, or they add lots and lots of sugar so they're sweet. These have lots and lots of sugar.”

“Like strawberries?”

“They’re red like strawberries. But they’re shaped like blueberries.”

“Okay,” Gabe said, not drawing any closer to the front door. But he relaxed a bit.

Robbie turned back to Lisa, who was still crouched just inside the door. “Uh. Would you like to stay for dinner?”

“I, uh, I just ate,” Lisa said, flustered. Robbie had seen her panicked, but never flustered. It was enchanting. She sniffed the air as she stood.

“Robbie-Robbie makes tasty food!” Gabe cut in. “The tastiest!”

Lisa took another step in. “Maybe just one.”

Lisa's “just one” was indeed just one, but as Robbie and Gabe shared the remaining five tamales, she kept throwing longing looks across the table. She scraped the cornhusk clean with her fork and licked that. “This was so delicious,” she sighed, as she pushed Robbie's buttered peas around her plate.

“Dee-licious,” Gabe tried out. He was definitely warming to Lisa, and the tamales. It was hard for Robbie to resent Ramón Cordova while he watched Gabe whirl his arms in joy as he demolished three tamales. He caught himself wondering if Ramón might teach him how to make them.

**Pathetic.**

Conversation was stilted. Lisa asked if he'd entered any races lately, and Robbie was unwilling to either admit he'd been cheating at underground street races for money, or explain to Lisa how that was possible (on turns, sink two tires half-way into the ground to make the car lean into the direction of travel and preserve maximum traction, on straights, boost the engine higher than the laws of combustion allowed to stay just ahead of the rest of the pack, optimize the engine timing with the back of his mind on each phase of acceleration, and when no one was looking, phase the car right through anything in his way), so he gave the terrible excuse that he hadn't had time. Lisa kept glancing surreptitiously at Gabe's exposed skin. She had too much tact to ask if Robbie had finally had a nervous breakdown and started beating and strangling his disabled brother. Robbie explained his progress toward getting his GED, and Lisa talked about her coursework—AP Calculus and AP English, and also working as reporter/photographer/editor for the nascent school paper.

The only other student working on the paper was, bizarrely, Guero Valdez.

Gabe grew bored with this verbal mine-clearing. After he and Robbie put his dishes away, he buzzed into his bedroom and returned cradling two of his action figures in his lap: the big plastic Ninja Wolf with the articulated joints, and an ancient and scuffed Terminator figurine that Robbie had picked up at a yard sale years ago, back when they lived in the group home. Last Robbie knew, Terminator lived at the bottom of Gabe's toybox.

“Best friends!” Gabe announced, slamming the plastic monsters down on the table across from Lisa. “This is Ninja Wolf. He runs fast. Like the wind on Mount Fuji. He chases bad guys, and he can smell them, and he is alert for danger. He eats chili dogs!”

“And who's this one?” Lisa asked, smiling, pointing at Terminator's black leather jacket and leering metal skull.

“This is Ninja Wolf's best friend. He makes the bad guys go away. He's smart and nice. He's really, really nice.”

“He takes care of Ninja Wolf?” She asked.

“Yeah! And Ninja Wolf takes care of him, too! Ninja Wolf has a preternaturally acute sense of smell. That's really, really good.”

“That's a big word,” Lisa said.

“I know,” said Gabe proudly. “You can be Ninja Wolf and I can be Ninja Wolf's best friend.”

“Oh, I,” Lisa protested, as Gabe slid Ninja Wolf across the table at her, tail-first. “Okay, I'll do my best.” She bounced Ninja Wolf across the table on all fours. “Ooooh! Owwoooooh!”

Gabe laughed his bright sharp laugh. “Ninja Wolf can talk! He can speak English and Japanese and Kyotosian.” He whirled the Terminator figure around through the air. “Ninja Wolf's best friend goes _Ryaaaaah! Hyaaaaaarrrh! Wrrrrrrooooomm!_ But sometimes he talks.”

“What are Ninja Wolf and his friend doing?” Lisa asked.

“They're eating mac'n'cheese,” Gabe announced. He made Terminator stir an invisible pot. “Arm, yarm, yarm, mac'n'cheese! Ninja Wolf, time for dinner!”

**Holy fuck, Pinball Wizard's been holding out on us,** Eli cut in, and Robbie had to dart out of the room and splash water on his steaming face.

_You haven’t been paying attention,_ Robbie snarled in his head, though he knew, below thoughts, that he hadn’t been paying attention either. On some level, apparently, Gabe knew about the Ghost Rider. Maybe it was subconscious. Maybe he just remembered being rescued from an overturned schoolbus and projected his affection for his brother onto “Ninja Wolf’s best friend.” Or maybe he still remembered the day Eli had tried to use him, and Robbie had had to fight him. The worst day of Robbie’s life so far.

Robbie felt sick to imagine his brother burdened by that kind of secret. Unable to articulate what he’d experienced, and certain to never be believed if he managed to explain it.

Robbie screamed into a bath towel.

Eli surged behind his eyes. What the fuck he wanted to do now, with Lisa and Gabe making friends in the kitchen before they moved to the living room to eat cookies and watch a movie, Robbie couldn’t begin to imagine. He shoved Eli back and did some deep breathing exercises he’d looked up online.

When he finally put the towel down, he found he’d burned a hole in it and smeared ash all over his face. The weird scar on his forehead that had showed up after Eli hijacked his life stood out sharp and bright, like a chrome V-emblem. The room stank like the inside of a muffler.

_What do you want?_ He demanded his reflection.

**Do you have any idea how painful it is to be this bored?** Eli replied.

_Cry me a river._ He washed up, trashed the towel, and crept back out.

While Robbie was otherwise occupied, Gabe had gone back to his room and retrieved his favorite Grouper Toad comic book (every comic Gabe read more than twice was a favorite) and was reading it to Lisa, acting out bits with Ninja Wolf and Terminator. The current page was actually an advertisement, disguised as a two-page comic borrowing other superheroes. As far as Gabe was concerned, those ads were a bonus.

“Hammerhead _wants_ Fruit Roll-Ups!” Gabe crowed, gesticulating with Ninja Wolf, apparently cast in the role of Hammerhead. “He wants Fruit Roll-Ups so much he forgot to steal the diamond!” He laughed his bright sharp laugh. Lisa watched him, lost, surprised, smiling all the way to her eyes.

Robbie resolved, right then, that he would never allow Eli to scare Lisa away. Not when she looked at Gabe like that.

Lisa spotted him, then, where he stood in the hallway watching them with bloodshot eyes like a creep. “Oh, Gabe, your brother's back. Robbie, do you want to help pick out the movie?”

Gabe's smile shuttered. He tucked Ninja Wolf and Terminator close to his chest. “Robbie?” he asked, quiet.

Robbie lurched into the kitchen. “Yeah, what's wrong?”

“Robbie-Robbie?”

“What do you need, buddy?” He looked Gabe over from head to toe. Did he have a muscle cramp, did he need to go to the bathroom, did he drop something, was he about to have a seizure?

Gabe pressed Ninja Wolf into his hands. Robbie looked Ninja Wolf over, then, finding nothing wrong, straightened the figure's arms and legs so he could stand upright on the table, arms up-raised in a proper Ninja Wolf gesture. “Do you want me to be Ninja Wolf?”

“No,” said Gabe. He stared at Robbie solemnly for a good ten seconds, while Robbie stared back, and Lisa watched them both, baffled. In a flash, Gabe brightened again. “Movie!” he exclaimed. “Then cookies!”

“Yeah, cookies,” Robbie agreed. Lisa shot him a questioning look, and he shrugged.

“I wasn't sure what you guys watch, so I brought a few.” She pulled three slightly battered DVDs out from her clean white vinyl purse. _Winnie the Pooh, Bambi,_ and _Pacific Rim._

Robbie pointed at _Bambi._ “Not that one,” he said, a little sharply. “I mean—sorry.”

“Omigod.” Lisa put _Bambi_ away. “ _I'm_ sorry. I didn't—”

“It's not—I mean—”

“I didn't think—”

“It's fine—”

“Robots!” Gabe interrupted, pointing at _Pacific Rim._

Robbie grabbed the DVD case, blushing furiously. It looked a little violent, but Gabe's comics could get pretty dark, and he handled those storylines just fine. The rating was PG-13, and Gabe was, in fact, fourteen. Besides, Robbie would be right there for “parental” guidance. “Okay, buddy, let's watch the robots.”

Fuck _Pacific Rim_ , Robbie decided, thirty minutes into the movie.

To say that Robbie Reyes was indifferent to pop culture was a comical understatement. He had called ahead and reserved the wheelchair seat to catch one movie in theaters in the past three years, and that was _Coco_ . If he couldn't see it with Gabe, he couldn't spare the money. If he couldn't listen to it on his phone while hunting down a customer's oil leak at Canelo's, it might as well not exist. Even previews passed him by; TV for the house wasn't in the budget. He hadn't the foggiest idea what _Pacific Rim_ was going to be about.

Eli was, for once, quiet. **Holy shit, how are they doing that? Is this all CGI?** was his sole contribution before shutting up to enjoy the film. Gabe loved the robots, and the monsters, and Stacker Pentacost. “But they shouldn't fight, they should make friends instead,” he insisted at every fight scene, and Robbie would reply, “I know, buddy. They're just not as smart as you.” Lisa loved the film, or she wouldn't have brought it.

But Robbie was becoming rapidly traumatized. He hadn't built up a normal nineteen-year-old's tolerance to onscreen violence, and the plot seemed designed to accelerate his inevitable nervous breakdown. Crack Jaeger pilot Riley _watched his brother die in front of him,_ while they were _mentally linked in order to pilot their giant monster-fighting mecha._ The heroine's _father was dying._ The monsters themselves were being manipulated. Cannon fodder, even more than the pilots of the mecha who fought them. And the whole conceit of the film, the damned centerpiece: the million-ton machines that defended the Pacific Rim could not be controlled by a single pilot, but needed two or three pilots acting in perfect synchrony, sharing a single mind-space— _the drift._ Each _Jeager_ was therefore a gestalt being of two souls, one will, and one unstoppable steel frame. Never had Robbie seen anything so like, and so exactly opposite, what it was to be the Ghost Rider.

He felt cheated.

Robbie was in a constant state of drift with _Eli Morrow._ Gabe, of course he would jump at the chance to pilot a Jeager with Gabe. He might hook himself into the drift with Lisa. Hell, even Alejo or Marty from the shop, or his old English teacher Mr. Wakeford. Instead, Robbie had Evil Uncle Eli, bound up with him so deep that he found himself forgetting the devil worship and mob hits and that time he'd tried to kill Robbie's mom while she was pregnant with Gabe, and instead blazing up with rage when his uncle broke out a bad pun. In a way, Eli was sitting on the couch, one arm around Gabe's shoulders and the other holding hands with Lisa.

And when they were the Ghost Rider it was more, and worse. Robbie couldn't kid himself to think he was the only one in control. He was a scrapper, but the Ghost Rider could _fight._ Eli had combat training from somewhere, but he couldn't sculpt a tornado out of a hundred feet of chain surging with hellfire. They both had anger issues, but the Ghost Rider was an overclocked engine fueled by rage. The Ghost Rider was more than the sum of its parts, born of some unconscious potential deep within Robbie, Eli, and the car, and there were times when none of them knew who was driving. It scared Robbie to know their souls were bound so tight. Sometimes Eli's mannerisms bled into him while they were in his human body. One day they might twist together so tight they'd become one single person, Robert Morrow, steady and responsible and trustworthy until the day he bashed your brains out with a claw hammer.

At least it wasn't Gabe with a ghost in his head, Robbie reminded himself, hugging his brother a hair tighter against his side. At least Eli was leaving Gabe alone.

After the climactic battle, the world was saved. Most of the Jaeger pilots had died, but the hero and heroine hugged on a life raft under a brilliant sky swarming with rescue helicopters. Some films would have faded out there, but _Pacific Rim_ spooled on, watching humanity lick its wounds, pick itself up, and fall in love with the monsters it had vanquished and the heroes it had lost. It was...sweet.

It was a good movie.

Then it was time for Gabe to brush his teeth and get ready for bed. Gabe leaned across the couch to where his power chair sat nearby, unhooked his crutches that hung from the back, and shimmied down and thunked into his bedroom. Monstrous growls and roars echoed down the hall as Gabe, presumably, put on his pajamas.

“Do you need a ride home?” Robbie asked Lisa as she packed up the DVD and the empty cookie plate.

Lisa hummed. “Gabe seems happy.”

“Yeah. This is, uh, normal, for him. Last spring he was—” _possessed—_ “I don't know.”

“How about you?” She gave him a searching look.

_Still possessed._ “I've been working through some stuff.” He fiddled with his phone. Thumbed on the Uber app, figured he might pick up a fare or two while Gabe was asleep.

“Thanks for the offer, Robbie,” Lisa said, fiddling with her own phone. “Maybe I'll take you up on it later.”

Robbie's Uber app pinged. He accepted it. Then he looked up. “Oh. Uh. I could cancel? If you want another ride?”

Lisa looked down at her phone and snorted. She covered her mouth and shook with giggles. “No, no, it's fine. 'Eliot.' I'll be happy to ride in your '2010 Dodge Charger.' _What are you doing,_ why are you a 4.5?”

“I don't know, I guess people like classic cars?” Robbie offered.

“No,” Lisa said, still with a laugh in her voice. “That's bad. That's really bad. I've never seen a driver with a rating below 4.6.”

“Oh,” Robbie said.

**Bullshit. That's bullshit! What kind of jackass makes a system where the lowest rating is an A-minus?**

“I don't have air conditioning,” he guessed.

“Do you drive like you think you're Vin Diesel?”  
“Uhhh.” Robbie wasn't sure which muscular bald guy Vin Diesel was. “Maybe?”

“Alright. You know, what, fine. Take me home. Maybe I can help you troubleshoot.”

Robbie hollered down the hall. “Gabe! I'm heading out to take Lisa home. Call me if you need anything!”

“Okay, Robbie!” Gabe yelled back.

Robbie swung on his leather jacket and waited by the door. “Ready to go?”

“I guess so,” Lisa said, with a thoughtful look toward Gabe's bedroom.

Robbie drove more sedately than usual, until Lisa told him to just treat her like any other fare. Then he had to ask himself, did he strictly need to precision-drift through every corner that let him pick up enough speed to do so? How fast did he really need to accelerate after each stop? Was it a wasted drive if he never saw the needle on the blower's boost gauge move past a pound or two?

“What do you think?” Robbie asked, when he stopped at Lisa's street.

“You definitely drive like you're auditioning for _Furious Nine,_ ” Lisa informed him. “It's fun, but not when you just want to get from point A to point B. The engine's really loud. I mean, it sounds nice, but it's definitely loud. The temperature's pretty comfortable right now, but I don't know how you manage to drive around at all in the daytime without air con. It's a two-door, so it must be inconvenient driving more than one passenger anywhere. And there's this—I mean, this is the cleanest car I've ever seen in my life, but there's this weird burning smell. It's a little off-putting.”

**Well, fuck you too, you prissy bitch,** Eli snarled.

“It's hard to get Ubers to pick up in this neighborhood, though,” Lisa continued. “Maybe they'll cut you some slack.”

Robbie squeezed the steering wheel. He needed money. Once he got his GED, there had to be other, legitimate jobs he could get. Right?

“Thanks,” he said.

Lisa tipped him five dollars. He tried to hand it back. “No, keep it,” she insisted. “This is your job. Right?”

“Yeah, I guess,” he said. “Thanks.”

He was heading back home when he got another ping. It was just two miles uptown, and he'd only been gone twenty minutes. “Nora,” 4.6 stars. He accepted the ping and headed off.

Nora was waiting on the sidewalk by a shabby motel in a slumping commercial district east of Hillrock Heights, a tall woman with flowing black hair and a heavy bust, shifting from foot to foot in tall boots and a red miniskirt. She watched the Charger approach warily. Robbie saw her eyes widen when she spotted the Uber sticker. He pulled up to the curb and cranked down the window. “Nora?”

“Eliot?”

“Yeah. Nora?” He opened the door and Nora studied the car for a long moment before getting in. She hugged her purse to her chest. Robbie started the meter; destination was the Shut-Eye Motel in Lynwood.

“Good to go?”

“Yeah.”

Robbie put the car in gear and started off at a moderate pace. The blower whined, rather than screaming.

**Let's take a detour.**

_Why?_

**'Cause. Take her to Turnbull Canyon.**

_No._

Eli piped down for a minute as they cruised off through the waning eight o'clock traffic. Then, **Lisa was a real bitch to you, kid. That wasn't helping, that was putting you in your place. I know you like her. You're basically a single parent, right, anyone who puts up with the kid is automatic wife material. But that kind of treatment hurts you, inside. You can't bottle that up. You gotta let it out, safely, away from Gabbie.**

Robbie saw a sign for a highway onramp going North, and he had to fight not to steer the car onto it. _What? What the fuck are you talking about?_

**No one would ever know.**

_Eli, what the fuck?_

**Kill the hooker! Take her to Turnbull Canyon and rip her heart out!**

_What—_

**Turn the car around! Go to Turnbull Canyon, it'll be empty after dark, get your wrench out of the trunk. Let her run! Chase her down, hit her in the head—**

Robbie turned on the radio and randomly cranked on the dial. Landed on a tractor-rap station. Eli sparked up the car and turned it off. Robbie started counting as loud as he could in his head. Tried to block out the image of Nora running from him in the moonlight, tripping on stony ground, her red skirt riding up. Wrapping her hair around his fist.

“One-fifty-four, one-fifty-five, one-fifty-six,” he whispered desperately.

“You okay?” Nora asked, cautious.

“Yes!”

“What's with the counting?”

“Mindfulness meditation.”

“Sorry. I guess that's your business.”

“It's okay.” _One-fifty-seven, one-fifty-eight, one-fifty-nine._

He got Nora to the Shut-Eye Motel with no detours. Before getting out, she fished a mirror, a tissue, and a few cosmetics out of her bag and touched up her lipstick and eyeliner. “How'd you like to make some extra money?”

“Doing what?”

She looked him in the eye, straight on. “You're not a creep,” she said, flat. “You took me right where I wanted to go, didn't make any stupid comments. It's worth some extra money to get a driver who minds his own business. And I don't know if you know this, but this car? Used to belong to a local carnál, called himself Grumpy. People might think twice about messing with a girl who shows up in Grumpy's old race-car.”

**My car. Mine. I built it!**

She pulled a twenty dollar bill out of her purse. “There's another one for you if you wait around 'till I finish up here. Won't be more than half an hour. I got a few more stops after this one.”

“Just shut down the app and drive you?”

“Yeah. I mean, I'll pay the fares. I just don't feel like playing Uber Roulette tonight.”

Robbie took the money. He always took the money. “Yeah. Yeah, sure, I can do that. I'll be right here. Yell if you need anything.”

She quirked a smile and packed up her purse. “I'm a big girl, Eliot. See you in a bit.”

Robbie watched as she strolled to a ground-floor motel room, checked her watch, and knocked. The door opened; whoever was inside didn't let himself be seen as he let her in.

He sparked up a little and passed his hand through the leather of the driver's seat, into the trunk where he'd stashed one of his math study books. The interior glowed in the light of his burning eyes, but his fingers, where he pawed around in the trunk, were flesh, not leather and fire. He found the book and pulled it out through the seat, shut his fires down. Wished he'd thought to bring a bottle of water. Maybe his whiny pax were onto something.

**Never has anyone used so much power to accomplish so little,** Eli sneered.

Robbie flung the text across the seats and seized the rear-view mirror in one burning fist. “ _Never do that again!_ ” he snarled, eye to eye with his reflection. Both eyes were red, crackling like coals, and his breath steamed. “I have had it up to _here_ with you! Don't _put things in my head!_ Don't twist me around! _Stop using Gabe to manipulate me!_ I will never be like _you!_ ”

**I didn't do anything.**

“Like hell you didn't! I saw things—”

**Yeah,** _**you. You** _ **saw them. I didn't have to draw it out for you.**

Robbie scooped the fires back in and snuffed them before he completely lost it. He panted in the dark as his eyes went dim. “I don't believe you.”

**For such a responsible young man, you sure do enjoy your state of denial.**

Robbie curled his legs up onto the seat.

**You died, boy. You died when those mercenaries pumped you full of military-grade lead. The Roberto Reyes who was, is no more.**

**The best thing for you is to let go of your delusions of righteousness. You're just as dead as I am. Hell, the only one of us that could've survived that ambush is this car.**

**You're not real. Only** _**we** _ **are real. You, me, and the car, we're one and the same. I've respected your needs, haven't I? But I have needs, too. You will kill someone. You can't not kill anyone anymore than I could make you—well. You will. It's a matter of time. All you get to choose is who. And I don't see you coming up with any suggestions of your own.**

Robbie put the meat of his thumb in his mouth and bit down.

**I don't say this to upset you, kid.**

“Fuck you.”

When Nora got back to the car, Robbie had been staring at the same page of conic sections for fifteen minutes. He turned his Uber app back on, accepted her ping, and drove her to the next motel. And the next, and the next. She paid him a hundred and fifty dollars in tips on top of all the fares by the time she told him to take her home, which wasn't far from Hillrock Heights.

“This is so much,” Robbie said, as he tucked the bills protectively into his wallet.

Nora shrugged. “People want what they want.”

They cruised home, Robbie trying out a different technique on the clutch, feathering it a bit, shifting smooth as silk while the great engine hummed.

“I'm not doing this forever, you know?” Nora said. “I have a normal job. I just landed myself in a financial clusterfuck and I gotta dig myself out.”

“Good luck,” Robbie said.

She drummed her fingers on her purse. “It's ironic, me getting driven around in Grumpy's car. You hear what happened to him? Got hooked on a bad batch of those super-pills that were floating around last year, got himself ripped in half by a supervillain from New York?”

“I heard.” Before he'd died, Grumpy had stomped Ghost Rider into a crater in the asphalt. The pills had made him ten feet tall with four arms and an even crabbier disposition.

“He used to throw these parties. Lots of high-end liquor, E, make one of his guys DJ, stuff like that. And he liked to have a lot of girls around. Everybody knew, if you had it going on, you know, up front and in the back, you could show up, have some fun, get high, and Grumpy'd maybe give you a little cash, like, as a party favor.

“Now as best as I can figure, these morons, they find pills, I don't know, maybe they fell off a truck or something. Maybe they picked them up off the floor. So they've got these pills, and they figure, these are illegal, someone didn't want us to have them, therefore they must be some kinda downer.

“I mean, for all they knew they coulda been antibiotics or cancer drugs or something. Any fucking thing. So I'm getting buzzed, I look away from my drink for one second—my vision gets all blurry.” She opened her purse, got out her mirror, tissues, and a little bottle, and started peeling off her false eyelashes and wiping away her makeup.

“Long story short, it wasn't roofies. Pendejo number one put his hand down my shirt, and I threw him through the wall. Through the brick wall, all the way through Grumpy's house and across the lawn. He died. I was just _gone,_ I was pissed, I ran home. And none of this seemed at all weird to me, that I'd just smashed some guy's head like an egg or that I kept outrunning cars like I was Captain America or some shit. I just felt...like for the first time in my life, I didn't have to be afraid of _anything._

“I got home. But I was gone. Totally out of my mind. I was always fighting with my roommate over doing the dishes; I was like, _I'll show her doing the dishes._ I was hungry as fuck, and I lost it because we were almost out of food. I just...completely trashed the place.

“I just need the extra cash so I can replace some appliances and repair the walls and windows, then I'll get another roommate and I'll be able to make rent again. See, this is just temporary. I got a good job, it's just this damn economy.”

“I get it,” Robbie said. “I hope things work out well.”

“You, too,” she said.

Robbie looked at her, surprised.

“Whatever situation you've got going on. Hope it works out.”

“Thanks.”

They pulled in to Nora's street. “You okay to do this again sometime?” she asked.

Drive Nora from motel to motel while Eli tried his level best to make Robbie murder her, but also earn over a hundred dollars in tips? “Okay.”

“Gimme your number, I'll call you if I need a pickup.”

Robbie gave her his cell number, and she entered it into her contacts list as “Driver 2”.

She gave him another of her flat looks before she got out. Without the eye makeup, she looked worn-thin, pragmatic. “Stay good, Eliot,” she said. “When you pick me up, you're a contractor, okay? You work for me. If you ever get any other ideas, well. I found another of those pink pills. You piss me off and they'll never find all the pieces.”

_**Wanna bet?** _ Robbie wasn't sure who'd thought it. “Understood,” he said, instead.

He gave Nora five stars.

 

 


	2. The Dead Zone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There is a murder victim in the back of the Charger. Robbie and Eli play detective.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lots of warnings this chapter, as described in the tags. Specific warnings for this chapter are in the end note at the bottom.

With a driver rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars, Eliot Miller was in imminent danger of getting kicked off the Uber app or having to attend a remedial driving course, neither of which were acceptable outcomes, because there was no way for Robbie to impersonate Eli's sixty-seven-year-old alias. So they developed a strategy to minimize the number of sub-satisfactory ratings.

One a.m., on Saturday morning; “Cindy,” 4.2 stars, hailed Robbie to take her and her two friends home from a Friday night at the _Loopy Luau_. “Omigaaaawwd, is that our caaaaarr?” Yes, that was the car. Cindy and her two drunk friends poured themselves in. “He's haaaawt. He's like fifteen but he's so hot. Shelly, don't you think he's hot? Hey, can I eat my fries in your car?” Yes, they could. “Can I drink in your car?” Yes. Fine. Robbie cruised sedately away from each stoplight, reducing the risk of his pax screaming and clutching for non-existent hand-bars, and as a bonus, the extra time added to into his fare. “Your car is so cooooool. I can't believe you drive this for Uber!!” Retching. “Oh, god, MacKenzie really overdid it. Do you have any water?” Yes, he had a case of tiny water bottles under the front seat. After they got out, he'd take a photo of the mess to earn a clean-up fee, then light up the car and vaporize the vomit. Then he'd Febreeze the interior to kill the brimstone smell.

Midnight on a Monday, “Lee,” 4.8 stars, across from the _Watering Hole_ on a street corner in the shadow of a decrepit apartment building, standing next to a shrine of a dozen votive candles and a young man's portrait propped up against a fence. “Oh god get me out of here, I don't know where I am and I think some guys across the street were planning to mug me. I was starting to think Uber didn't come here. You may have literally saved my life.”

Five a.m. on a Thursday, “Rosa,” 4.8 stars, beating the morning traffic into the city. “Isn't it nice to be out before the sun comes up, when you can just roll down the windows and feel the breeze in your hair?” M-hm. “Say, do you have anything to charge my phone?” He did.

Eleven p.m. on a Sunday, “Phil,” 4.7 stars, back door at the Whittier Emergency Clinic. “Drive this box to the diagnostic laboratory downtown. If you make it inside thirty minutes, I'll tip you twenty bucks in the app.” Blood and urine samples were clean, silent, and uncomplaining sources of five-star ratings and excellent tips—when Robbie could cut loose, the Charger always made it across town under the deadline.

Eight p.m. on a Friday, a text from Nora. _Four appnts. $40 per wait + fare. You free? Two others also riding._

He figured out his schedule. He worked at Canelo's all the days and half-days he could get, while Gabe was at school—worked out to about thirty hours a week. The days he didn't work, he slept. He avoided transporting pax in the heat of the day, but drove all Friday and Saturday nights, when he could afford to sleep in after, and drove at the witching hour most weeknights as the bars started to close. The four star reviews rose to fives, the one-stars slowed to a rarity. His rating edged up to 4.6 and stayed there. He was making decent money—not enough that he didn't have to worry, but enough to keep just ahead of the bills. Eli was steaming mad, but what else was new.

Then he got The Cooler.

 

* * *

 

Six a.m. on a Friday, “Tomas”, 4.8 stars, East Los Angeles Medical Center. Instead of a little cardboard box waiting for him around the back of the hospital, Tomas had a three-foot plastic cooler. It was just like a regular cooler you'd put ice and drinks in, but plain white, with the hospital's name and address on a vinyl sticker on each side. Strips of colored tape sealed each end as tamper-proofing.

“This is going to the Gold Coast Conference Center,” Tomas said, helping Robbie ease the cooler to the floor behind the front seat. “Ask for Mr. Sherman when you get there, he'll know where this goes. Just don't look inside, man, we'll know and you won't be happy you did.”

 **That's not real tamper-proof tape,** Eli said helpfully as they drove off.

At 6 a.m., LA traffic was manageable, but still not good. Robbie pushed the Charger through its paces, starting and weaving and jerking to a halt. A jacked-up F-250 had the audacity to roar up behind him and practically hump his bumper, and he brake-checked the asshole, then spent the next mile trying to trap him in the blind spot of a semi-truck in the next lane. The pickup slipped by, then tried to pass Robbie on the right. Fat chance. The blower roared. The Charger leapt ahead, leaving the F-250 looming behind a dawdling Geo Metro. Impatient traffic Robbie had been bottling up rushed forward, and he left the truck five cars behind him.

He'd just broken every unwritten rule of the road ever made, but better that than burning up, melting up out of the car, jumping feet-first through the F-250's windshield and tearing the driver's ribs open like a piñata.

That...should never have been an impulse Robbie had to shove down.

Fuck Eli—except, Eli just was what he was. He'd been in his forties when he'd died, his character rotten beyond all help, and being dead probably wasn't too conducive to personal growth. Just because Eli _liked_ watching Robbie struggle with intrusive, murderous thoughts didn't mean he was pushing them at Robbie on purpose. Well, a lot of the time he did. Just not always.

It wasn't Eli's fault that Ghost Rider was a monster, anymore than it was that Robbie had died.

That was the mercs.

He felt cold, as the sun began to rise. He rubbed his cheekbone where one of the bullets had passed—an odd angle, missing his brain, that left his mouth crushed and jagged with bone fragments. Phantom aches of ice all through his chest, his abdomen, his hip. The bullet that struck his hip was the one that knocked him off his feet, jolted him around. His heart was jelly. His blood wasn't even pumping when he hit the ground, just oozing, as his broken body trembled and his vision slowly faded on the men in fatigues who stalked past him, retrieved some bags from the car—he'd never even looked in the trunk of the car before he'd borrowed it, he didn't know there was anything there—splashed some gasoline over them both and struck a match.

They'd murdered him. Taken him from his brother. And Robbie had done nothing at all to deserve that. He'd been stupid, desperate. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time, borrowed the wrong car. But the mercs had gunned him down and burned him like trash, simply because he'd been in the way. He'd been innocent.

He didn't know why he was thinking about his death as he wove through traffic on Interstate 10. He didn't like to think about it, and he couldn't usually remember it so clearly.

 **Revenge?** Eli offered.

_I think we did that already._

Something wasn't right. He was cold. He couldn't concentrate, couldn't stop thinking about that night. A helicopter whop-whopped in the distance, which didn't usually bother him unless they got close, and he shuddered. No one should have to die like that. For no reason.

Someone had.

Someone was dead who shouldn't be.

“What's in the cooler,” Robbie said. He put on his signal and eased onto the shoulder of the freeway, rolling over broken glass, a fragment of burst tire, a ragged T-shirt, a smashed cardboard box. He tried to melt through the car to get to the cooler, even though he wasn't lit up—ended up bouncing back and forth stupidly against the upholstery. He unbuckled himself and squeezed between the front seats, rolling with a squeak of springs onto the back bench. He dragged up the cooler from where it was wedged in the footwell. The contents sloshed and thumped.

 **Careful with the tape!** Eli prodded him. **Easy. Easy. Peel it up, so you can put it back how it was. What's gotten into you, kid?**

Robbie opened the cooler. Inside, it was swimming with half-melted ice chips and a half dozen severed human forearms, each individually vacuum-packed and bar-coded, meat and skin peeling away where they stopped just above the elbow. He reached in and pawed around in the ice. Sloshed water on the seats. Pulled out one of the arms, dripping.

**Alas, poor Yorick. You know this...chick? Short man with small hands?**

No, he didn't. But they were dead. This wasn't an amputated arm donated to science. They were dead. They shouldn't be. They hadn't done anything.

They'd been murdered, just like Robbie. But they weren't coming back.

 **Kid, you just hopped the express train** _**waaaaaay** _ **across the state to Conclusionsville. Where's this coming from?**

**There's five other arms in here. What's so special about this one?**

“I don't know.” Robbie was shaking. This was wrong. It was _wrong._ A murder victim's body parts belonged in, he didn't know, the Coroner's office, or a crime lab. Not whatever this was. Not mixed in with other people's limbs headed for the Gold Coast Conference Center. He clutched the arm and peered through the plastic, looking for clues. Tawny brown skin, barely wrinkled. Neatly kept nails. A little blue heart tattoo on the inside wrist, neat edges, nice even color saturation, just starting to blur and settle with age. On the elbow, skin peeling down away from the meat, making him sick to look at it.

The other arms had bone sticking out, like they'd been cut with a saw. This one was at the same time more and less neat: muscles trimmed short at the tendon, the glossy white hollow of the elbow joint exposed where the upper arm bone had been completely removed. Less precise. More biological.

There was a sticker with a bar code on one end of the bag. And that was all.

 **Shove over.** Eli nudged against Robbie's hands, and Robbie let him. Eli squeezed the arm up and down, squinting at the skin, at the blood that pooled in one corner. “ **Frozen and thawed. See these scars?** ” On the thin skin on the inside of the arm were subtle, irregular blemishes. “ **They used some good scar cream I bet, but these are all recent, not more than a couple years. This one, couple weeks. Feel this.** ” He rubbed Robbie's fingers firmly through the plastic and flesh against the arm bones, where they were thickened for an inch or two. “ **Old break. Again, not more than a couple years.** ” He squeezed and flexed the wrist and hand. “ **Definitely an adult. Teenagers're squishier. By the shape of the palm, probably a woman. See this dark ring around the wrist?** ” He rotated the arm to turn up its paler underside, where a band of pigment showed, much like the marks Gabe had now from his crutches. “ **Not the right place for being tied up. This is from a hand. Repetitive pressure mark.** ”

Eli sank back. **You might be right, kid. But of all the bullshit powers to come back from the dead with, did you have to pick psychometry?**

Robbie took a picture of the bar code with his phone and put the arm back in the cooler. Closed it and pressed the tape into place.

**If we figure out whodunnit, are you finally gonna kill 'em?**

Robbie wedged the cooler back into the footwell. He wanted to blaze up, spin the car around, scream down the shoulder back to the hospital. Fling fire and steel in every direction. Ram the Charger through entire wings. They'd put her in the cooler. They'd cut her up. They'd done this to her.

**Of course they cut her up, you nimrod, they're a hospital! They have a morgue! It's their job to dispose of dead bodies! You need to find out who she was, and who did the killing—if she was even murdered at all and didn't just fling herself off a bridge. What the fuck is wrong with you today?**

“Right,” said Robbie, letting out a steaming breath through his teeth. He crawled back into the driver's seat and merged abruptly, roaring from zero to forty, the car behind him laying on the horn as they slammed their brakes.

They pulled up to the Gold Coast Conference Center. People skittered out of the way as Robbie stalked through the doors, and the security guard put his hand to his earpiece. There was a signboard in the lobby, pointing down the hall, that read “Minimally Invasive Techniques in Carpal Tunnel Surgery—Wet-Lab”.

“Delivery for Mr. Sherman,” Robbie growled.

He let the Cooler go.

 

* * *

 

Robbie Reyes was not a hacker, but he was a talented mechanic, and many of the same skills applied. Identify the make, model, and year of the system of interest. Download the manual. Check online forums in case the manual is wrong. Locate a supplier with decent reviews. Order the necessary parts and meticulously install them.

East Los Angeles Medical Center used Automed records software in Windows 10, running on Dell boxes. He could see that at a glance as he leaned over the ER's reception desk, pretending to ask about his mother who had had a heart attack. When they failed to locate any Maria Millers, he turned and left, blowing his story beyond all credence. Oh, well. He was just a skinny thug with gauged ears and weird scars on his head, one of thousands, interchangeable.

Eli's knowledge of the Dark Web had been gleaned over just two nights he'd snagged Robbie's body for, when Robbie was sleeping so soundly from exhaustion it probably qualified as a neurological condition. In that time, he'd Googled “world wide web crime,” discovered Reddit forums on browser security and the modern surveillance state, panicked, downloaded Tor, figured that was good enough, and gone stumbling through the dark-web from job postings to cocaine markets, cackling to himself.

Robbie bought an account at the cheapest VPN provider he could find, bought a tiny fraction of a bitcoin, and bought a worm from a hacker who had a reputation for providing user-friendly instructions and not poisoning their customer's computers. He loaded the worm onto a tiny black USB drive.

There were several ways to get malicious code into a target computer. If it was physically remote, he would have to do some phishing, try to sneak a convincing email past the hospital's spam blocker, or weave malware into a website the staff had to use. These were somewhat beyond Robbie's skill level. The quickest and most reliable way was to physically plug his new worm into the system. This would require getting around the reception desk and touching one of the computers.

They picked a weekday when Robbie didn't have a shift at Canelo's. Instead of turning on his Uber app, he drove to Starbucks and, gritting his teeth, ordered a tray of four Venti frappuccinos, one plain, two mocha, and one Unicorn. He took a curious sip of the Unicorn frap. Diabetic angels danced over his tastebuds.

**This is future coffee? What the fuck?**

He parked at the hospital and loosened all the lids before getting out of the car. Stuffed the napkins they came with into his pocket. Got rid of the receipt.

**Okay, kid, you're tense. Jittery. Ease up a bit—oh, what am I saying, this is an Emergency Room, of course you're tense. Your beloved Uncle Eli just got hit by a car and it looks bad. You were driving the car! That's why you brought the milkshakes. You're wracked with guilt! Shaking. Clumsy. Everyone's waiting for you in the Intensive Care Unit. How will you ever atone? Your father. The way he looked at you last night. How could you hurt his little brother like this? His own flesh and blood! This is one mistake milkshakes won't fix!**

Robbie shuffled through the rows of chairs in the ER lobby, passing a little girl on her father's lap with a towel wrapped around her hand, a metal-head in head-to-toe leather and spikes puffing dejectedly on an inhaler, an old woman with a swollen leg, another old woman with a swollen ring finger. A steady morning crowd. And there were three people lined up at the reception desk.

He shoved abruptly to the front of the line, tripped on nothing, and flung the frappuccinos all over the man at the computer.

**Bold. Simple. I like it.**

“Ay! Dios! Lo siénto!” Robbie hopped the desk, waving his napkins as the receptionist gasped with the cold and wiped coffee and whipped cream out of his eyes. Everyone in the lobby who was able to stand was standing and trying to see, and the other receptionist was storming over with a dangerous look in her eye. Robbie flipped the keyboard upside down, pouring out a cup of beige slush.

“Sir, I'm going to have to ask you to step back into line,” she said coldly.

“Lo siénto, lo siénto,” Robbie repeated, wiping the sopping, protesting man's shirt.

**Are you kidding me, not this “No hablo el Ingles” shit, this is humiliating.**

“Señor, no estás permitado entrar aquí,” the woman continued.

Robbie looked up and froze. He shoved the sopping receptionist in his roller chair at her and they collided, the man getting frappuccino all over her scrubs. Dropping to his ass, Robbie fumbled the USB out of his pocket and plugged it into the box on the floor while she shook her hands off and wiped at herself in fury.

“ _Out!_ ” she bellowed. “ _Afuera!_ ”

“Sí, sí, lo siénto,” Robbie babbled, and climbed back over the counter and bolted out of the hospital.

His hands were shaking as he started the car. He hoped he hadn't shoved the male receptionist too hard. He hadn't had time to check the monitor and see if the worm was installing itself—it was designed to, but you never entirely knew, with complex machines. There were always variables. He stopped at another Starbucks, bought an Americano for Eli and the wifi password, set up his laptop, logged into his VPN.

He only had a day or two—hours, if the hospital was serious about security—before routine maintenance found and deleted his worm. So he'd done his homework beforehand, printed out the manual for the Automed software. He pulled up the icon for the spyware he'd bought—a cute cartoon weevil—and through that, opened a remote window into the hospital's record system.

Even with the manual, navigating the thing was a nightmare.

Tiny, arcane icons that looked like little red and blue Webdings. Pointless matryoshka nests of files. Thousands of Smiths and Garcias. He entered the number from the arm's bar code into search bar after search bar. Their coffee was cold by the time they found the proper files.

Candace Isabel Gutierrez, female, Black, 26 years old. Weight 113 pounds, height 5'4”. Arrived 3-12-2016 at 4:23 a.m., care of unknown Good Samaritan. Dead on arrival. Cause of death: vehicular trauma. Cadaver donated to medical science.

Just a few lines. There were attached PDFs of the intake and exam forms, the death certificate, the release of the body, all from six months ago. Robbie downloaded and saved those. His head was spinning.

He was so sure there'd been foul play. Something violent, personal. Walking along the road and getting hit by a car was plenty violent, but it sure wasn't personal. Wasn't murder. He was going crazy. He'd just spent three hundred dollars on illegal software to break into a hospital on an irrational impulse.

**Hold up, kid, I wouldn't count your psychometry out yet.**

_My what? Why would I suddenly have psychic powers, that's your bullshit._

**Well, you were dead. On average, sixty percent of people who survive being dead longer than ten minutes will return with some form of supernatural juju. Like demonic possession or seeing ghosts. Psychometry is the most common, accounts for about half of all adult-onset psychic powers in non-mutants. Stephen King wrote this book,** _**The Dead Zone** _ **, where the guy gets visions from touching objects. He gets famous, gets hassled by the public, becomes a hermit, and assassinates a political candidate. Pretty much true to life. Now since you only homed in on one single severed arm, and I can't imagine there's a severed arm out there that** _**doesn't** _ **have some story to tell, your talent has got to be...really weak. But that just means there must be something to this.**

_Why do you know this stuff?_

**Why do you think I came back with** _**useful** _ **abilities like pyrokinesis and teleportation? I did my prep work while I was alive.**

_You—you sacrificed people to Satan so you could come back from the dead with cool powers?_

**Some people buy insurance. But we were talking about you. Your arm. You chased a lead, and you got a name, and a missing Good Samaritan. Look up the girl first, that's the easy part, and then that ought to lead you to the fly-by-night who dumped her at the hospital. There'll be someone to kill at the end of this road. You can feel it.**

That was the worst part: Robbie _could_ feel it. Something. Destiny, maybe.

He downloaded Ms. Gutierrez's medical records with a queasy squirm of guilt in his gut, closed down the Weevil app, and left for home. Instead of running Uber, he listened to the police bands as he drove.

Drunk-and-disorderlies. Traffic stops. Loitering. Nothing for Ghost Rider to rage against.

This was Los Angeles. People did horrible things to each-other every day.

He just had to track them down.

 

* * *

 

On the Internet, people live forever.

Candace Isabel Gutierrez had graduated from UCLA in 2012 with a major in marketing and a minor in graphic design. Her senior capstone project had been a collection of public safety ads for children, with bold, clear illustrations of everything from how to cross the street to how to spot riptides to what to do if you are being chased by a bear.

Her Facebook was still up. She had been slender, glowing, feminine. Her profile pic showed her posing in an off-shoulder floral blouse and scarf beside an abstract outdoor sculpture, and her banner was fluffy clouds on a blue sky, the colors just off enough to be an amateur shot. Her Wall had turned into an improvised memorial, with friends and family members leaving quiet, sad notes. Occasionally striking up short conversations and offers of support. Leaving each-other Likes. Robbie wished there was a sad version of a Like.

Going back in time, Robbie found a sparse but tidy feed of pictures. A few Selfies, a few in-progress and fresh-from-the-oven shots of baking projects, and a lot of pictures of Candace with a tall, good-looking white man tagged as Alex Northwick, taken at beaches and hiking trails in Los Angeles, Hawaii, and Costa Rica. They made an almost painfully photogenic couple, Alex's lean square jaw and athletic lines, Candace's halo of shining curls and her smoky cat eyes. There was a Christmas picture with the two of them every year going back to 2012. Classy monochrome trees, with a different set of decorations each year. Most of Candace's posts were restricted to friends. When he searched for images tagged with her face, very few of the recent ones did not include Alex somewhere.

 **It's always the boyfriend,** Eli cut in. Alex's profile was private. Just the profile pic of himself, with his shirt off, against a mountain peak.

Robbie sent some random friend requests to friends of Alex Northwick. _Eventually one of them will accept, just to be polite. Then I'll be a friend of a friend, and then when I send Alex a friend request, he might think he's supposed to know me, and accept. Then I'll be able to read his profile._

**Oooh. This is some cute spycraft you got going on.**

_A stalker did this to one of Lisa's friends._

**Why haven't we burned him yet?**

_It was before you. Buzz off._

But Candace had a sister in town with a less restricted profile, and one of Candace's co-workers who'd posted condolences had very little privacy protection. He'd worked at a logistics firm downtown. Robbie pulled up the firm's employee roster on Wayback Machine. Candace had worked in reception a year ago.

It was enough to construct a really shaky cover story.

He found a phone number for Candace's sister, Iris, and her mother, Esther. Her father Simón had an obituary: stroke, 2010.

He called Esther. “Hi, you don't know me, I'm calling to ask about your daughter Can—” click.

He left Iris a voicemail. Let a little of his mother's accent bleed in. “Hello, Iris Gutierrez-Bao? I'm so sorry to bother you. I'm calling to check on your sister Candace. We've been out of touch and now no one will tell me what happened. Please, please call me back. My name's Roberto Morrow—” _what the fuck, what the fuck??_ “—uh, and, my phone number is...”

**I'm flattered? Appalled?**

_What's happening?_

**Freudian slip.**

And then all they could do was wait.

 

* * *

 

Nora called while Robbie was at the shop. He made an excuse, clocked out for his ten minute break, and took the call in the bathroom.

“What can I do for you?”

“Me and the girls want to talk terms,” Nora said, firmly.

“Uh...”

“We're happy with your service,” she said. “It's been a month and no creep factor.”

Yeah...no creep factor here at all, just counting to a thousand in his head the whole ride, or if the intrusive thoughts were especially intense, reciting obscure English vocabulary. “Okay.”

“Some of the girls just work on their knees, they can't spare forty bucks a trip,” Nora said. “But if you think about it, it doesn't cost you much more time or gas to take two girls to the same party than just one.”

“Makes sense.”

“I propose, for multiple passengers, forty bucks per half-hour wait from the first rider, ten for each additional.”

Robbie was making thirty dollars a day with Uber—on an average day. He needed Nora's business. “Four riders maximum and forty bucks for any side trips,” Robbie qualified. “Plus drive-time and mileage.”

“Done.”

Robbie blinked at himself in the mirror. “I'm a red light shuttle service.”

“That you are. Stay good, Eliot.”

“You, too, Nora.”

 

* * *

 

Friday night, ten p.m., he got a ping, “G,” 4.5 stars, in Lisa's neighborhood.

Lisa's area was nicer than Robbie's, but not by much. She carried mace and a large rock in her purse. He checked that Gabe was settled into bed and headed out.

The pax waiting at the curb was fucking _Guero._

He could see Guero's mouth move as he crept down the street. _Fucking Reyes._

Guero Valdez was a bastard. A thieving, tough-talking, pistol-packing rat fink, with a deep scar turning down his thin lips on one side, and green eyes and freckles on a pinched, long, mean-looking face. He was eighteen, CHECK like Robbie. Until last spring, his life's ambition seemed to be to get himself sent to prison and eventually get made with the EME.

Guero sneered at the car and leaned back nonchalantly in his new wheelchair.

He was probably the last person Robbie should ever give a lift to.

Robbie and Guero spent a few months in the same foster home when they were twelve; Guero had been a target. The other kids called him a suckup, claimed he got special treatment because he was blond. This was bullshit. Guero was almost as unpleasant at twelve as at eighteen, and the foster parents had neither the energy nor the interest to treat any one kid better than anyone else. Robbie, at the time, had been tougher and fiercer than most of the other kids, and he and Guero soon formed an unspoken arrangement where Robbie watched Guero's back and Guero helped Robbie protect Gabe. They'd just started something approaching friendship when Guero moved back with his mother. Robbie never thought more about him until he aged out, moved to Hillrock Heights, and transferred to Lincoln High, where he saw Guero again. Guero had three inches on him now, and he'd grown tougher, fiercer. He had two friends who followed him around, called themselves a crew. He seemed happy to see Robbie, in his slant-wise, dickish way, and offered to lend him a hundred dollars to buy cigarrettes and e-cig refills to re-sell to the underclassmen, a good money-maker and a low-stakes way for Robbie to get his feet dirty. Robbie had turned him down hard. In retaliation, Guero and his buddies had “borrowed” Gabe's power chair right out from under him. Ripped up Gabe's comics. Pulled a gun on Robbie to show him who was boss, and then spent the next three weeks cruising around on Gabe's chair, spoils of war. That was about when Robbie got desperate and decided that borrowing a customer's car to bet against drug kingpins in an illegal street race was safer than staying in Hillrock Heights, and he'd ended up dead in an alley.

After the first battle between the mercs and drug dealers died down, the Rider beat the shit out of Guero and his “crew” and retrieved the power chair.

That was not when Guero lost the use of his legs.

Nora got slipped a pink pill, and she turned into Miss Hyde for a day. Guero took blue pills—half the gang-bangers in East LA took blue pills from the big New York drug pushers last spring—and he turned into mean, hatchet-faced John Cena for a few hours. That was the “good batch” of super-pills. The pusher from New York recruited an army of John Cenas, and he sicced them on the Rider after luring Eli onto a bridge. Eli dumped Guero off the bridge, Robbie took control and snagged him with a chain before he went into the river, and then Robbie pulled him to safety too hard and broke his back.

Oh, and somewhere along the way, Guero had figured out Ghost Rider's identity.

 **This asshole will not adapt well to being a cripple,** Eli said. **He's like a coyote with two legs. He'll bite every hand that tries to help him, probably drink himself to death in a pay-by-the-hour motel inside five years. He's rubbish. He did this to himself, and if he had half a brain, he'd thank you for putting him out of his misery. Besides. He'll find a way to expose us. Didn't Lisa say he's some kinda kid reporter now?**

_Shut up._

**Broken record.**

Robbie stopped dawdling and pulled up to the curb. He rolled the window down—he made the car roll its own window down, the crank spinning with no hand on the knob. “You're calling yourself G?”

“This is not my fuckin' day,” Guero replied. “Why don't you just cancel?”

Like hell was Robbie stranding a guy in a wheelchair in this neighborhood. “Why don't _you_ cancel?”

“The fees, fool. The fare's bad enough as it is.”

Robbie opened the passenger door, without moving his hands or breaking eye contact. Guero sneered at him. “How do you want to do this?” Robbie asked.

Guero lowered his eyes. The corner of the sidewalk was nearby and had a ramp. But depending on where Guero's back was broken, he might not be able to lift himself into the Charger on his own. It sat low, only a little higher than the chair itself, but it had no hand-grips for him to use. “I'll take some help if it won't put your back out,” Guero said. “Skinny-ass freak.”

“This skinny freak kicked your ass,” Robbie replied, as Guero wheeled himself down the ramp and onto the cracked tarmac. He scooped Guero up; they kept their heads and bodies angled so as to look at and touch each-other as little as possible. Guero was lanky, not quite twice as heavy as Gabe. He set him in the passenger seat, and Guero reached backward to grab the headrest to pull himself a little straighter. Robbie collapsed the wheelchair and put it in the trunk. There was a backpack full of books and papers hanging from it; he handed that off to Guero. Shut the door by hand. Got in. “Where to?”

Guero gave an address on Ruckleroad Lane, for a dilapidated apartment complex just five blocks north of Robbie's home.

Robbie headed off and put the radio on. This late, the indie station played local stuff, and he tuned in halfway through the chorus of an energetic track by _Manic Hispanic._ The lead singer bellowed into the microphone as drums and guitars rattled and squealed. _“Beef! Chorizo! Beef, beef! Chorizo!”_

Guero sneered at the speakers. “This shit supposed to be lyrics?”

“It's a dick joke,” Robbie informed him, as if to be helpful.

“Chinga tu madre. When'd he come up with that, two minutes while taking a dump?” Guero leaned forward, and lifted one leg out of his way with his hands so he could retrieve a book and a penlight out of his backpack. Robbie glanced at him in surprise. He had never seen Guero so much as crack a textbook while at school. He supposed it was odd, in retrospect, that Guero had never had to repeat a grade level. It was a small paperback book with dense print.

Guero had eyes on all sides of his head and he caught Robbie staring. “Yeah, Reyes. Laugh it up. I'm the golden boy now. You're the delinquent who dropped outta high school.”

“I didn't say anything.”

“You were thinkin' it.”

“I'm glad you got something to keep you busy.”

Guero smacked himself in the knee with the book, making a sharp crack. “Fuck you. I don't gotta 'keep busy,' I gotta live my life. _Which you ruined_ . You might be happy staying in this shithole, but I'm getting myself outta here, and _this_ ,” he waved the book, “is how I gotta do it.”

“I don't wanna stay here, either,” Robbie snapped.

“Don't gimme that, you're king of this shithole.”

“Nobody's king of this shithole.”

“Yeah, you are, diablo. Everybody's scared shitless of you. All the authority, none of the responsibility. You don't even have a crew to roll with. Don't have the balls to tell people what's what, or help anybody out when they ask.”

Nobody got to talk to Robbie about responsibility. “And what about your crew, huh? Why aren't they with you?”

“Can't take care o'them no more,” Guero shrugged. He opened his book again. _The Jungle_. There was a picture of a cow skull and a train on the front. Robbie'd never heard of it.

 **I had to read that in high school,** Eli said. **Gave me a lotta ideas. Thought about bein' a butcher for a hot minute.**

“What's that?” Robbie asked.

“Book,” Guero said, with a suspicious look. A minute later, he added, “It's a classic exposé on the meat-packing industry in Chicago at the turn of the century. A big reason they invented food safety regulations.”

“Mm,” Robbie said. He turned the radio down a couple notches, to be polite.

“Gotta bone up on this shit,” Guero continued. “My transcript's not what you call clean off the key. I'm not getting outta here with just a sob story and some tight rhymes.”

Robbie downshifted for the stops. Started again smoothly. Took corners in easy arcs, pushing up with the outside shocks like he was some fancy Mercedes outfitted with hydraulics in the suspension. Guero turned pages steadily.

“We're here,” Robbie said as he pulled in to the address. He looked up at the apartment building. Looked like the kind of place where the elevator might stick halfway down. Some of the concrete balconies were visibly crumbling, re-bar sticking out of the corners.

Guero looked up, startled. He put his book and penlight away. “So, Reyes,” he said, looking down. “I'm not gonna dick around here . I know, you know I know, we know, so no bullshit, right? You never stay injured. Whatchu got in your system, and can I get a hit of it?”

Pills. That was what Guero knew. Robbie wished he just popped a pill a couple nights a month.

“I'm possessed by an evil ghost,” he said.

“No shit?”

“No shit.”

Guero laughed. Robbie got out and snapped open the wheelchair, scooped him up and helped him into it. “You know what, you can keep that. Keep your evil ghost. I guess there had to be some sucker worse off than me.”

 

* * *

 

Friday, midnight. Robbie was parked in front of a Days Inn with Uber turned off, taking notes from his American History prep book while he waited to drive Nora and another woman to their next appointment. The police band crackled. “East Los Angeles Precinct, all available units, respond to a hostage situation in progress on North 187 th  and La Jolla, Address 453b La Jolla Avenue. CHECK Suspect is white male, five foot ten, one hundred eighty pounds, witness reports armed with a handgun. Suspect is inside the house with two young children and one Hispanic female. Has threatened to shoot all occupants of the house. Responding units are to form a perimeter and await arrival of SWAT and federal hostage negotiators.”

_**YES!** _

The engine roared. Robbie started to light up, the pages of his textbook glowing in the fires of his burning eyes. Pain, beautiful pain, and to delay it was agony. He ported the book into the trunk. Grabbed his phone and texted Nora: _emergency. gtg._ Stuffed the phone safely into the glovebox and let himself blaze up. Light and heat, and his soul swam back and forth between the burning car and his burning body, the wheels flaring red, the blower spitting gouts of flame high into the night. He cracked his knucklebones inside the Rider's black leather skin. Shook charred flesh out of his sockets and faceplates. Roared in eagerness, sparks and gasoline boiling out between clenched teeth.

The car streaked off, lighting up the asphalt as they wove between stand-still traffic. Zigzagged through intersections. _Can you port us there?_ Robbie demanded.

 **I have no idea where the fuck La Jolla is,** Eli replied.

_North somewhere._

They cut a jagged red ribbon through the night. Picked up North 187 th , followed the building numbers. Blue collar, white collar, blue collar, no collar. Towering Oleander shrubs. White collar again. Two-story white stucco houses with clay tile roofs, neat green lawns, flowers and rock gardens, a pre-recession housing development on the side of a hill. Four hundred, four twenty-five, four hundred and fifty three.

They slowed and cruised past the house, muffling their flames until they passed around the corner.

453b La Jolla was one half of an upscale duplex with a large driveway and neatly sculpted juniper trees in the front yard, Dr. Seuss topiary. Every one of the large windows was lit up, but the blinds were down.

**I can port you to the top of the roof if you get me two streets over onto that hill. If you want to be subtle, or some shit.**

_There's kids, Eli. Yeah, I wanna try subtle._

They rumbled uphill and around. Two cop cars squealed in the distance, flashing lights drawing closer. In the driver's seat, the Rider drooled molten steel, shaking with impatience. The fire built hotter and hotter under the shuttered vents of their skull, and Robbie felt it start to shine out through the seams in their leather skin.

**Ready. Aim.**

Robbie melted into the car and hauled himself up out of the roof, feet planted, a long chain wrapped around his arm, one of Eli's old knives at each end.

**Fire.**

He dropped into a pool of blackness under his feet, landed silently on the ridgeline of the duplex. Spat out a mouthful of burning oil that dribbled down the clay tiles, opened his vents and let the flames light up the sky until he could think.

He listened. Tune out the traffic and sirens and yap of the neighbor's dog who'd spotted him. Tune out the hum of the home's air conditioning that carried through the soles of its feet. Let the body and its fires be still. Hunt.

Sobbing, from one of the upper rooms at the front corner. A man, and a child.

The chain—not a knife on the end, he wanted a hook. Fix the chain to the whole-house air vent. Stalk silent and blazing to the edge of the roof, leap off high up and away, roll in midair to look back on the big bedroom at the corner of the house, light and movement behind the Venetian blinds. In the pause before gravity took hold, heave on the chain and shoot himself toward the window, burst through the glass like a flaming javelin. Hit the opposite wall and roll to his feet, chain in his hands again, knives again. Roar the song of his engine, roar his rage.

There was the man with the gun. Fading hair, unshaven, sweaty, white with fear, dressed for bed in boxers and a soft tee-shirt.

There was the woman. A few strands of gray, her lips pale, smothering within the man's arms. The children were not here. The children were crying inside the closet.

Ghost Rider rumbled as he whirled the chain in his fist. Spat fire.

The man swung the gun away from the woman, dropped her to the ground. Fired on the Rider, caught a ricochet from the faceplates. Punched holes that spurted flame through the Rider's skin-suit. Fired until the magazine clicked dry. The Rider snorted Eli's laugh. Snap out the chain, knife flying around millimeters from the man's eyes, catch him by the neck. Haul him overhead, tiptoe. Shake him as he screams. Bash his head on the ceiling until plaster crumbles around them. Fling him to the floor. Let him scramble to his feet, run for the hallway. Fling the other end of the chain, wrap him shoulders to knees. Drag him back, swing him by the ankle. Shake him again.

The man screaming. The woman, also screaming. Pounding on the Rider's back. Broke a marble statuette over his steel skull.

The Rider dropped the man, spun on her, hissed.

“Please,” she sobbed. “Please. I don't know if you can understand me—please don't kill him. He's out of bullets, look at him, he's not going to hurt me now—”

 **She's got that right.** The Rider roared again and kicked the man, snapping ribs.

“Please! Please! My husband is sick. He's sick in the head, he's been hearing voices but I didn't know it was this bad. He needs to be in a hospital. He doesn't deserve to die.” She pushed in front of the Rider and covered the chained man with her body. “If you have any mercy in you. If you understand me at all. Please. Please just go.”

**Stupid bitch. End him!**

_No._

Robbie focused himself. Found himself within the fires of the Rider, pulled himself up from the waves of their aggression. “ _Hospital,_ ” he rumbled.

“Yes,” the woman sobbed, hope in her eyes. “Yes! He needs help. He needs psychiatric help. Please. I love him. We love him.”

The Rider flipped the man over with the toe of one boot, bent down, fire of his eyes and breath singeing the man's shirt. “ _Go to the hospital,_ ” he snarled in the furious voice of his engine.

He left the man chained on the floor of the bedroom. Jumped out the destroyed window, found the nearest shadow and melted back into the car, snarling and gasping through the blower, shuddering through the gears and wheels. They revved and revved, spitting fire in every direction. Lights were turning on up and down the neighborhood, waking up to stare at the burning car that screamed in frustration in the middle of their street. Cops had found the car and had started setting up a second perimeter, guns drawn.

**VALIÓ MADRE!!!**

_Take us to the hills._

**Fuck you! Fuck you, Roberto Reyes! YOU COCKTEASING LITTLE SHIT!**

Robbie congealed into the driver's seat and rammed the Rider's forehead repeatedly into the steering wheel. The cabin erupted in flame. Outside in the street, officers raised their weapons.

_The hills, Eli! NOW!_

**FUCK YOU!!!** Eli howled. A black hole ripped open in front of them and they roared into it. Screamed their fury to the empty desert.

They wore themselves out at three in the morning. As soon as Robbie snuffed out, he puked up coolant and motor oil, then dinner and lunch, then just bile, heaving and heaving. He trembled. Stopped at a gas station for a Gatorade and an energy bar on the way home, so Eli wouldn't hijack his body tomorrow and murder his passengers while Robbie dozed in a hypoglycemic coma.

He checked his messages. Nora was safe, but she was not happy. She was cutting future fees by half.

 

* * *

 

Iris called while Robbie was cruising down I-5 in the center-lane, ferrying Michelle, 4.3 stars but a perfectly good pax as long as Robbie was concerned, into the IT district at five in the morning on a Tuesday.

“Sorry, I gotta take this,” Robbie said when he saw who it was. He didn't need hands to drive. He asked Eli to keep an eye out in the mirrors for cops. “Hello. Iris? I'm, uh, I'm so glad to hear from you, I didn't think you'd call.”

“I was thinking it over,” said the voice from the voicemail message. Now grim, flat, slightly hoarse. “I might as well talk to you. How did you know Candace?”

“I just saw her sometimes,” Robbie said. He had no confidence in his ability to weave a convincing lie. “She was always nice. But she seemed,” he made an educated guess, “sad.”

“You could say that.”

The line was empty except for Iris' slightly wet breathing. **Good, good. Just wait. Let her jump to her own conclusions, then play along.**

“I don't know what your angle is,” Iris said at last. “I don't really care. Hell, if you're willing to actually listen, I'm not about to turn that down. Weekdays, I have lunch from twelve-thirty to one thirty, and I can swing an extra half hour on either side of that. There's a coffee shop across from the Whittier Library. We can meet there.”

 _Yes._ Robbie had to stop himself from offering to go today, begging a day off from Canelo. He needed the money. Candace had died six months ago, two more days wouldn't change anything. “I can meet you Thursday. Twelve-thirty.”

“I'll be carrying a red bag.”

“Black and white jacket.”

“Be seeing you, Mr. Morrow.” She hung up. Robbie shuddered.

His pax looked at him curiously. “What was that about?”

“Funeral.”

“I'm so sorry.”

“It's okay. I didn't know her very well.”

 

* * *

 

At twelve thirty on a weekday when he didn't work at the shop, Robbie was usually sleeping, a heavy quilt tacked up over the window and a bottle of melatonin on his nightstand. On Thursday, he was regrettably conscious. The previous night-slash-morning he'd made a hundred and fifty dollars, without Nora's tips, carrying people home after a soccer game had packed them into the bars.

Iris was Candace's opposite. Tall and a bit heavy, with bone-straight dark hair and subtle, professional makeup, a fashionably boxy jacket over a nipped-in skirt, a crisp white blouse, low-heeled pumps. She occupied a patio table under an umbrella, a square, red leather handbag upright on the table like a flag.

Robbie felt grubby.

“Ms. Gutierrez-Bao?” he asked, when he reached the shade of the umbrella.

“Who's asking?” she asked.

Oh, god, Robbie was going to have to say his alias again. “Roberto Morrow.”

“Yes, I'm Iris Bao. You want to get coffee, or get right into this?”

“I'm ready. Their coffee is...really expensive.” He sat.

“Mm.” She looked him up and down. Robbie hunched. Picked paint off the underside of his chair. “Why don't you tell me how you knew Candace.”

He and Eli had worked on this. Hell, Eli had coached Robbie on this as hard as a sitcom dad whose son was going on his first date. “I work at an auto shop,” true, “and we do a lot of restorations, collector cars, that kind of thing.” A stretch. “We used Angelino Logistics to ship these cars back to the owners,” total lie, “and the boss liked to send me to collect the shipping paperwork 'cause, well, wasn't always anything for me to do.” Another total lie, and a humiliating one—Robbie could do almost anything short of electrical system diagnostics and automatic transmission servicing. “I always liked going because Candace worked at the front desk,” he continued, spiralling deeper into fantasy-land. “I had this huge crush on her. She was so pretty. And she was always super nice to me, even though I was just the messenger boy. I was away for a few months, and then the next time I went to Angelino, she wasn't there. I asked but they wouldn't tell me anything. I found her on Facebook and found out she was...”

“Dead.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, she is.”

Robbie nodded.

Iris lifted a hand and shut her eyes for a long minute. “So you're not a reporter?” she asked at last, steady.

Robbie held eye contact very carefully. “What? No.”

“Damn.”

“Should I be?”

“It would mean someone with some power gave a, a crap, what happened to my sister,” Iris said. “So yes. I guess you should be. But we're here anyway. So here's what I know.

“My sister Candace met Alex Northwick when she was twenty-one and in college. She was...not a woman of wide romantic experience. She fell desperately, obsessively in love with him. They got together soon after that and stayed together for the next five years. They lived together for three.

“Candace never had many girlfriends, and this is probably why it took me as long as it did to realize she was in trouble. You see. Women need girlfriends. We need someone on our side, some outside perspective to keep our heads on straight, while our men are doing their level best to brainwash us. They can't usually help it; this world brainwashes all of us one way or another. Candace had me, big sister Iris, busy with my new baby and my career, and Mom, who has her own issues. I was all wrapped up in my kids. Of course Candace wasn't coming over every other weekend. Who wants to hang around all that screaming and yelling, eat kid food, watch kid movies. She's a grown woman with her own life. I thought. She's in love with her Prince Charming.

“It didn't help that I was jealous. Not of her and Alex, I love my Stephen. But the lifestyle. The freedom.

“Mom's not a big one for holidays, so it took a while before we had an excuse to see them for longer than an hour or two. And Alex. He wasn't one for family. His parents were a real pair. Separate bedrooms. And they didn't seem to like him, except when out of the blue they'd drop off some really expensive present—downpayment for a boat. Sculpture from some minor-league artist. That kind of thing.

“So I thought, Alex is uncomfortable with us. He's white-bread rich. Well, fine. Long as he treats my little sister like a princess, I'll put up with it.”

Iris swallowed, took a breath, held up one hand again for silence. When she spoke again, it was a low, monotone snarl. “He did not treat her like a princess.

“Candace still has—had—a MySpace. From when she was a kid. Used to use it as a diary until I found her profile and teased her about it. DestinyDanger2001. She was obsessed with Destiny's Child when we were kids.

“I don't know why. I'd just got off the phone with her. I had a feeling. I looked up her MySpace and she had all these recent posts about Alex. You can read them. You should read them. The cops couldn't seem to find the time.

“I mentioned Candace didn't have much romantic experience before Alex. She was a nice girl. Sheltered. Well, Alex had certain wants that Candace hadn't expected to provide. She said in her diary that she didn't want to. But she was afraid what he would do if she didn't provide for him, so she just. Let him do it to her.

“She also posted...drawings. Of herself. In little sections. Bruises, mostly. Drew them in Paint. No photographs. She'd actually deleted all her old selfies. She used code names, called Alex just A. And she still—” The raised hand again. “She was still so in love with him. She wanted to _help_ him. Can you believe that? This had been going on for years by then. It was escalating. And she still loved him, so much. She was so strong. So strong for that sonofabitch.

“So I call a family meeting. I get Mom, Steve, Uncle Carlos. We all agree Candace is in deep shit, either that or she's got a hell of a creative writing project going on. Mom's got a friend in Seattle, so the plan is, we talk sense into my sister, load her on a plane, and then, I don't know, make her stay up north forever. Hope Alex forgets about her. That was the plan. We called Candace. Took her over a week to get free, she begged off because of work, commitments with Alex, sailing trips with Alex. Finally we got her to Mom's place. And she was limping, she was fucking _limping_. She was always a girly girl, but now she had on a full face with foundation and powder, razor-sharp eyes, falsies, all that to see me and Mom, because it was second nature now to cover up. She claimed she twisted her ankle.

“Mom, bless her. Mom plays the frail old woman card. Finds chores for her to do around the house—weeds, clearing out the attic. Kept her running around like Cinderella. After a couple days of this, Candace stops wanting to leave. Offers to regrout the bathroom. Repaint all the ceilings. She's remembered what it's like not to worry about where the next pinch or slap is coming from.

“We get more of the story from her. This house Alex lives in, it's gated, and there's no keypad. Just a remote, just one remote Alex carries. He bought her an Audi but she can't drive it anywhere because she can't get it out of the garage. He installed locks on the interior doors. The entire upper floor of the house seals off. She cooked for him, but she wasn't allowed to leave the house when he was at work, but she had to have dinner ready when he got back. This one time, she told me, she was making this eggplant dish and she was out of lemon. She only had half the amount of lemon. And the chard was wilty. So she had to climb the fence. Flag down a neighbor. Hitch a ride down to the grocery store, get the ingredients, take the bus back. All for half a lemon. He was so irrational and controlling, she was terrified he'd notice the food wasn't perfect. I think when she told me, she was starting to realize how scared she really was. Then I—”

Iris cut herself off and turned completely around in her chair, shoulders hitching. Robbie twisted his fingers in the seams of his jeans.

“Then I fucked it all up,” Iris continued, her voice breaking. She pulled a napkin out of the dispenser on the table and blotted her eyes, blew her nose. “I let something slip to her. And she found out I'd been reading her MySpace again. And she called Alex.

“We all got to witness the Alex Northwick charm offensive. He had flowers and a suit and a new dress and a trip to Aruba where he could beat the shit out of her in a foreign country and he woulda brought a puppy with a bow on its head if he didn't think it was too cliché. All 'yes, ma'am,' 'no, ma'am.' He had Mom half-way forgetting what he'd done to her daughter. He didn't act guilty at all, see. Made you forget what he was capable of. He whisked Candace back to his castle on the hill.

“I couldn't get word of my sister for three solid months after that.

“One day she calls, completely out of the blue. I pick up. She's not mad at me anymore, she sounds weird, like she's happy? Not like Candace being happy, but like someone on TV. Invites me and Steve and Mom to this molecular gastronomy restaurant, Alex is paying. We show up. She looks healthy, but that doesn't mean anything, they make concealer for your legs nowadays. It's us, her, Alex, and two of Alex's weaselly looking friends and their wives. Turns out this is their engagement party. I get Candace in the bathroom, ask her if she's lost her damn mind, and she swears, she swears to me, that Alex is getting better. He's gone to therapy, turned over a new leaf. She asks me to please, please be happy for her. She loves him so much. Nobody could love like Candace. And I tell her, I can't be happy, but I'll pray for you.”

Iris paused, picked up her coffee, put it down without drinking. Her jaw worked and she shuddered, breathed deep, dabbed her eyes more with the napkin.

When she spoke again, it was a snarl. “I should've got off my praying ass instead.

“All quiet on the Northwick front, the next few months. I get a couple phone calls. I met her for coffee one last time, helped her pick out invitations. Not a lot of invitations to order, on Alex's side.

“Then I get this call at eleven o'clock, March 11. It's Alex. In all the four years he's been screwing my sister, he's never once called me. He asks me where Candace is. Sounds worried.

“Now Alex is...a _strange_ man. He's always in control. Master and commander type, keeps his cool through any craziness that drops in on him. So I knew, when he called me in a babbling panic in the middle of the night, that something didn't add up. If something happened, Alex wouldn't _sound worried._

“So I say, I don't know, where do you think Candace is? And he says she ran off, they had a fight—really, he called it a fight—and she stormed off and disappeared and he's worried something might have happened, the way she was acting. And so I say, I hope to God she did finally storm off, and if I did find her, he'd never hear about it from me. And I hang up.

“The next week, Mom gets this call. It's from the hospital. They've called her to let her know that Candace's personal effects, which were removed from her body, are due to be donated to charity if she doesn't come pick them up.”

Robbie blinked at her. “Wait. _What?_ ”

Iris nodded. “That's the first time we heard Candace had died. The hospital calling for us to pick up her effects.”

“Didn't the police—”

“Near as I can tell, the police were never involved.”

_How?_

**Administrative error or coverup. I don't like this.**

“We ask to view the body. They tell us there's nothing to view, remind Mom that the relatives already donated the body to science. So that's where she's gone: science. Mom says she never identified the body, and the hospital says yes she did, it's right there on their paperwork. Try to convince her she's forgotten the whole thing, that she's crazy. But we never signed anything. We never saw anything. Candace didn't have any existing will to dispose of her remains; she wasn't an organ donor and she told me once that she wanted to be cremated. And they'd had the body a week. A whole week before anyone told us Candace was dead.”

“And no one ever...investigated Alex?” Robbie asked.

Iris leaned forward onto her elbows, grim. “Here's the turn of the screw, Mr. Morrow. Alex Northwick is Doctor Northwick. That's how Candace met him in the first place. He was the surgeon on duty when she cracked her ribs in a car accident five years ago. She was his patient. He pursued her after hours and she fell for him. At that time, he was in his last year of his fellowship. Now he's full time at East Los Angeles Medical Center as a trauma surgeon.”

“He's a doctor,” Robbie repeated dumbly.

“Surgeon. MD, FACS.”

**Oh, fuck.**

_What?_

**Just—fuck.**

“I know Alex killed my sister. And he used his position to muddy the trail somehow. If you look at his personal history and character, listen to mine or Mom's testimony, it's obvious. He should at least get interviewed. But whenever I tell this story, the moment, _the moment_ I let slip that Alex is a surgeon, they get this look in their eye. They turn away. They rationalize it. Oh, he's just a run-of-the-mill domestic abuser, what a pity, at least he's single now. Poor woman, I wonder what happened to her, after she ran from him. What terrible luck.”

“He got away with it.”

“So far, he has.”

**And he's gonna continue getting away from it. We're dropping this, kid.**

_What? No. He made that woman's life a living hell and then he killed her and used his position at the hospital to cover it up. We need more proof, but unless Candace really did go wandering down the highway and get hit by some random car, we're gonna make him pay. He's never gonna hurt anyone again._

**This is a doctor. He saves lives for a living. You really think that killing him is going to make this world a better place?**

_Suddenly you give a shit? You heard Iris. Candace_ _**loved** _ _him. She sacrificed for him. Why would anyone kill someone like that? Who does that?_

“Thank-you for telling me,” Robbie said, studying the toe of his shoe.

“More than you bargained for, I'm guessing.”

“Little bit.”

“You know any reporters? Any cops?”

“Not really.”

“Nobody on the State Medical Board?”

“No, ma'am.”

“Then I don't really know why I told you any of it. Let's call it practice. Eventually I'll get someone useful to listen. No offense.”

“None taken—wait.” Robbie stood, drew himself up. Felt absolutely ridiculous. “Your sister was innocent. She deserved to live. She deserved to be happy. Whoever took that from her will pay.”

Iris shook her head slowly at him. “I don't think I was ever that young or stupid. Why do you think I haven't done it myself? I got my own family. Alex isn't worth yours.”

 

* * *

 

It was a twenty minute drive back home, with the traffic picking up. The sun beat down and the hot car baked pleasantly.

“Why do you suddenly care about this domestic abuser?” Robbie asked, fighting sleep as he waited for a light to change.

He felt Eli form and discard several hidden thoughts. **I know you fancy yourself as the rational half of this partnership, boy. But you've been dead, too. That changes you. Messes with your head. Ever since you sniffed out that severed arm, you've been obsessed. Look at yourself, playing Nancy Drew. Used to be, I had to poke you and prod you and you still let scumbags do business right under your nose until they were shooting up your actual street. Take a step back. Think about what you're doing.**

“I am. I have. Someone murdered Candace Gutierrez, and Alex Northwick had the means to cover it up. That's what my—my 'psychometry' told me, okay? She was murdered and she didn't do anything to deserve it. She wasn't fighting for turf, she wasn't a satanist-slash-assassin, she was murdered. Just like I was. And I can't give her her life back, so I'm going to do what I can to get her justice. We help people, and that's the only way I can help her now.”

**Let me stop you there.**

**I told you once we were uncatchable. Okay? I lied.**

**Small-time vics, or vics with dangerous jobs, your drug-dealers and mercenaries and hookers, hell, even your mob bosses, your kingpins—even if they're important people, congressmen, that kind of thing—if they have enough bodies buried, then when they snuff it, there'll be a whole lineup of different suspects. And the cops generally won't try their absolute hardest. Corruption is tough to rub out, unless it rubs itself out, see?**

**But this doctor. This Alex Northwick MD Fancy-Ass Surgeon, he wasn't pressured into anything. He doesn't have any shady business partners to take the fall. He's just a dick. A dick who's had probably half a million dollars worth of training in saving people's lives. So what if he—**

**Okay, what happened to the girl was very unfortunate. But if we kill Alex Northwick. If we start killing untouchable people like this trauma surgeon, then people who CAN catch us are going to notice.**

“Like who? What're they gonna do, cuff us? Put a boot on the car? Worst they can do is send another ghost rider, and Johnny knows us, I could explain—”

**How about seal us up in an unbreakable mystic orb for a thousand years. Yeah. Or boot us to the kind of hell dimension I worked so hard to avoid. It's a big world out there, kid. We might hold off mundanes like the Avengers, but we'd have to run. Really run. You want that? The Sorcerer Supreme, now, or the Queen of Limbo, we won't outrun. We've got a lotta power, but there's always a bigger fish.**

**This doctor is exactly the kind of trash we can't take out.**

**Find someone else.**

 

* * *

 

Robbie went home and tried to sleep. Picked up Gabe, made dinner. Slept some more. The next morning, ran a pax to LAX for a red-eye before it was time to make Gabe's breakfast and head off to the shop for some real work. He did five lube-oil-filters, located a leak that had been pumping exhaust into a Civic's cabin air, and tried to convince a client to get her front struts replaced.

“I understand you haven't been having a problem yet, ma'am. But these struts are original to the car. Over time, with repeated stress, microfractures develop within the steel, creating a risk of failure. That would be a sudden, significant problem.”

“There's always a risk! I could get cancer! I could get hit by a car walking through the parking lot! I could get fired because my car is in the shop an extra week because, oh, you need this replaced, oh, this tube went bad, oh, it's oozing the wrong kind of ooze! You're running a snow-job! A fuckin' snowjob! When it starts to go bad, I'll replace it. I can't spare that kind of time, or cash!”

“A strut doesn't fail gradually,” Robbie insisted. “It cracks. Best case scenario, it throws off your alignment and causes uneven tire wear. Worst case scenario, **your brains wind up splattered across the freeway median.** ”

“Reyes!” Canelo bellowed.

**Stupid sack of pork, we were just trying to do our job!**

_Let go! What the fuck are you doing?_

Robbie fought Eli down, just as Eli ducked back under. In the abrupt handover, his vision blacked out and he swayed on his feet. “Sir, I'm so sorry, I'm sorry, ma'am.”

“Take a tenner,” Canelo barked, guiding the furious client into the office. “See, ma'am, over time, with repeated stress, microfractures will develop within the steel of even a properly manufactured strut...”

“I worry about you,” Canelo said later that evening, having ordered Robbie into the office. “You're smart. Sensible. God knows you're a hard worker. But lately...are you getting help? Like, psychological help?”

“It's not on my insurance,” Robbie said with a grimace.

 

* * *

 

At Eli's insistence, Robbie dropped Candace Gutierrez for a week. He didn't look at her medical records. He didn't read her MySpace. He didn't look up Dr. Northwick's professional biography.

Tuesday morning at seven, he picked up two male pax from a modest adobe-style house in Montebello, under the account for “Simon,” 4.6 stars. Most of Robbie's early morning pax wore some kind of workday uniform. Suits, khakis, that sort of thing. Simon wore an embroidered satin bomber jacket and distressed jeans, and his friend Junior was in head to toe Lakers gear. Junior carried a comically small backpack by Bathing Ape. They both chose to sit in the back seat. Simon's text alert went off every couple minutes.

 _I'm not an idiot,_ he told Eli, before Eli could get started. _Trash. Rubbish. Blah, blah, blah. They're paying customers._

**No one would look for the bodies.**

_I know._

**Tonight!**

_Maybe._

**Fuck's that supposed to mean?**

_It means maybe I don't want to send them to the ICU. Or maybe I do. I don't know yet._

“Got a long ride planned, guey,” Simon announced as they rumbled through a manicured hilltop development. “You up for a few more stops?”

“Sure.”

They pulled in to a long, looping driveway at a sparkling white Mission-style three-story home with a wet green lawn and a geometrically-manicured hedge. Junior crawled out over the passenger seat and knocked on the cut glass door. A few minutes later, the door cracked open. Junior and the occupant talked for a moment, exchanged small items. When Junior returned, zipping up his backpack, Robbie was out of the car with the passenger seat folded down.

“Don't step on the leather.”

Junior swung himself back into the back seat. “Okay, man. Just thought you'd want to stay inside.”

Robbie grunted. Snapped the seat into place, got back in. “Where next?”

Next was a nearly identical house five doors down. After that, they got on I-5 and headed South to an apartment complex in Santa Fe Springs. Junior and Simon both got out for this one, looking over their shoulders as they buzzed in, and they stayed in the apartment for twenty minutes while Robbie tried to memorize the names of all the countries in Asia and Africa.

Nobody knew this stuff. It probably would've been easier to just stay in school.

After the Springs, they went North toward Whittier on the 605, stopped at some more middle-class neighborhoods, Hondas and Chryslers parked here and there instead of Mercedes and Audis in double garages. Then they got back on the highway and headed North again. Simon's text alerts slowed, and they'd both started to relax into Robbie's seats, feet on the floor. The day started to warm up.

“Water?” Robbie offered.

“Thanks, man,” Junior said. They each accepted a tiny bottle of spring water and Robbie cracked both windows. Junior unzipped the backpack and shuffled through it, ruffling paper and plastic.

“How's Lupe?” Simon asked.

Junior looked up, surprised. “Good. Real good.”

“And Max. He doing well? Liking Preschool?”

“Yeah. I mean, he cried at first, but he's settling in. Making friends. Started to draw on paper instead of on the wall, that was a relief.”

“Oh, shit! You gonna get your deposit back?”

“Sure. 'S just paint. Landlord White, you know. Looks better now than before Max got to it. He's really settling down, you know, emotionally. Now Lupe can be with him in the evenings. He's got to this point—it's weird. It's like, wow, suddenly this is a tiny person, you know?”

“I _know_ . This one time Katie taps me on the shoulder, 'Tienes que desayunar conmigo, _todos veces._ ' _Todos veces,_ in this squeaky nin͂ita voice. The authority! It's like Maria gave birth to my mother!”

“Yeah,” Junior sighed, zipping up the backpack. “Lupe's got an accounting test on Friday.”

“She'll whip it.”

“Hell, yeah, she will.”

“She gets her license, what then?”

“I dunno. Stock shelves at WinCo, I guess. Not much else I can do that's legit.”

“You're giving up a lotta opportunity, guey. You got a good head for this.”

“Yeah, I do.” Junior gave Simon a hard look.

“Sorry,” Simon said. “You're a good partner. Just callin' it like it is.”

 **Heads up.** Robbie checked the rear-view mirror, spotted a patrol car catching up in the fast lane. Lights weren't on. The Charger was holding to the speed limit, much to the annoyance of the cars behind it. His heart started pounding out of control. His gloves grew damp around his palms. He heard helicopters.

There were no helicopters. It hadn't even been cops who'd killed him, he'd just assumed they were until they actually caught him. This car wasn't even interested in him, he hadn't broken a single traffic law today.

His mouth was suddenly bone-dry.

His pax stared, rigid, out the tinted windows as the cruiser lingered just off the corner of their back bumper. Then it swerved into their lane, switched on the light bar, and blasted the siren.

Robbie made a strangled noise. No. He wasn't getting arrested. He wasn't going to jail. Gabe wasn't going back to foster care. No.

**Why don't I take the wheel for a stretch.**

Robbie signaled and began working his way to the right lane. “Okay,” he said hoarsely. “It's gonna be okay. I got a clear title. No priors. Gimme the bag.”

“What?” Junior choked, just as hoarse.

“The bag, gimme the bag. There's...secret panels. Pass it under the seat. You got anything else?”

Junior tucked a knife into the bag, Simon a handgun.

“Okay. Give it here.” Junior kicked the bag under the front seat. The cop was right behind them, getting impatient. Robbie sparked up a little, watching the road. He pushed his left hand into the door, dissolved it into the car. Reached up through the floorboards under the seat, felt around, found the bag. Now where to put it. The cops would paw through the car head to toe and he wouldn't get another chance to spark up and move it, not unless he wanted Ghost Rider to be a cop killer. He pulled the bag down into the floorboards, slowed, and came to a stop on the shoulder, eyes still burning, arm still stuck halfway through the door. The tires were just wide enough. Robbie felt for the airspace within the left front tire and wiggled the bag around until it fit completely inside while solid. Let go, pulled out his arm, shook out his hand. Chugged a water.

“I'm sweating,” Junior said. “I'm sweating. I'm shaking. I feel like I'm gonna die in here.”

Robbie killed the engine and rolled the driver's side window down, both hands on the wheel. “I'm just the driver. I don't know you. I'm just the driver.”

The cops were taking their sweet time getting out of the car. The one in the passenger seat was on the phone. The lights still flashed, sending ripples of panic down Robbie's back. Finally the driver, a stocky middle-aged white man, got out and approached.

**Lemme take this. I do a mean Minnesota accent. Always throws 'em off.**

Robbie clung stubbornly to his body and to the steering wheel.

“License and registration, son,” said the cop.

Slowly, Robbie pulled out his wallet. Handed the whole damn thing over. Opened the glove box, took out Gabe's Iron Man and Batman figures. Got the title.

The cop opened his wallet and slipped out his driver's license. “Roberto Reyes?”

Robbie nodded.

“Face me, son.”

He complied. Stared at the cop's clip-on tie.

“Says here, eyes, green.”

Ever since Eli had moved in, Robbie's right eye was a weird rusty color. “Medical condition,” he rasped.

“Best you get that changed next time you update your license,” the cop said. “Proof of insurance, too.”

Robbie shuffled through the papers in the glove box with shaking hands while the cop did his best to blind him with a flashlight. He found the most recent insurance card.

“Stay in the vehicle,” the cop said, and he sauntered back to the squad car with Robbie's paperwork.

Robbie let out a long breath, his heart pounding and skipping. He fainted.

Eli caught him, filled him out like a hand in a glove before he collapsed. “ **You boys sit tight back there,** ” he told Robbie's pax. “ **We'll be off in a minute unless you blow it.** ”

Junior nodded quickly. Simon leaned back in his seat, staring up at the ceiling and breathing through his nose. “It's hot as hell in here, guey,” he muttered.

“ **Hell's hotter. Quitcher bitchin.** ”

The cop returned five agonized minutes later. “This here's a salvage title,” he said, not handing Robbie's wallet or documents back.

“ **So it is.** ”

“Any idea what the history is on this vehicle?”

“ **I may.** ”

“What have you heard?” the cop asked, looming over the driver's window.

Eli grinned up at him. “ **Some fuckwit fries the clutch and wraps her around a light pole 'cause he can't handle more'n two hundred horses. Dumps her at Canelo's Auto and Body to fix his mess. Whaddya know, he never pays. The shop takes possession of the car, gives it to the mechanic who did all the work: me.** ”

“Do you know if this vehicle has ever been used in the commission of a crime?”

Eli's grin split Robbie's face before he stifled it. “ **Well. I always figured it's best not to ask.** ”

“Please step outside the vehicle and open the trunk.”

Junior stifled a whimper. Simon prayed under his breath.

Eli stared up at him. There were laws about this. Legally, he could refuse to consent to a search and it was on the tip of his tongue when he caught sight of Robbie's skinny face in the mirror: very young, very pierced, and a couple shades more tan than Eli ever used to get. “ **Can do, officer.** ”

He got out. Let the pax out. Waited for Cop Number Two to get out of the patrol car and stare at them all with one hand on his gun. Planted his hands on the hot car to be frisked. Watched the pax get frisked. Watched smugly as the cop shined the flashlight through the trunk, shuffled the Rider's chains around, peeled up the upholstery where it wasn't glued down.

The kid stirred. _What's happening?_

**Shh.**

After leaning in and feeling and sniffing every inch of the cabin he could reach, cop number one took each of the pax's wallets and carried them back to the squad car while Eli leaned comfortably against the Charger and the pax hovered their hands above the hot metal, trying not to move.

Cop One returned again, an interested light in his beady eyes. “You gentlemen know each-other?”

“ **No, sir. I'm just the Uber driver.** ”

“Oh, really. Where you headed today?”

“ **Library,** ” Eli said.

“Nine o'clock on a Tuesday and you boys are going to the library.”

“Job applications,” Junior added.

“That so?”

“Yessir,” Simon said.

The cop looked at Eli, and Eli shrugged.

“I thought you had to be twenty-one to drive for Uber,” the cop said, and Eli rolled his eyes, shifted his feet. Bent his knees.

_No. No! Just go with it. Nobody remembers all this stuff. Just lie! Lie! You're good at this! Come on! You don't want the Avengers after us for killing a cop, remember? Dammit Eli!_

**For fuck's sake shut up. Fine.**

“ **They changed the rules,** ” Eli said.

“Huh,” said the cop, looking over the gleaming vintage Charger with its massive, spotless chrome blower. “Well, if it gives kids like you a legitimate source of income, I guess that's good. You stay safe out there. Don't pick people up after dark in shady areas, you never know who'll you get.”

“ **No, sir. Never know who might be standing right in front of you.** ”

_Don't tease him! You showboating sonovabitch!_

The cop handed them all their documents back. They waited for the patrol car to drive off before getting back in. Junior stumbled into the weeds by the roadside, bent over, and puked.

“ **Heh-heh. Little nervous?** ”

“Man, what's with you?” Junior demanded, spitting.

“ **Oh, there's nothing like a little danger to get my blood going. You boys ready to go?** ”

“Guess so. Can I have another water?”

“ **Fresh out.** ”

Eli put the car in gear. As they started to move, Junior's bag thumped and rolled inside the front tire, unbalancing the wheel and setting his teeth on edge. Robbie started pushing at Eli in earnest, like a small child kicking the back of his seat on an economy flight. **Whatcha think they're selling, kid?** he asked, humming to himself. **Coke? Speed? Horse? Something upscale. I hope it's coke. That's what you need in your life, kid, a bump of coke! Everyone in Hollywood does it, it's that, whatcha call it, peer pressure.  
**

**I've sold coke a couple times. Not hard to make a profit when it's free. And that bag felt like it was mostly full of cash, anyway. Pawn the gun. Not a fan of Glocks, myself, but I like a good Sig Sauer. We've got similar sized hands, I should just get all my favorite models.**

Robbie suddenly went very still. Eli braced himself, gripping the wheel hard and sitting deep into his seat. When it came, Robbie's tackle hit like a truck, like a hurricane wind, like a rogue wave. Eli rode it out, vision flaring and blurring. **Careful, boy. Pax in the car, wouldn't want to crash.**

The pressure faded as suddenly as it had risen. Robbie's silence was a little eerie. Eli waited, glancing down at the boy's phone. They were still on a course to the dealers' next stop, a house on a cul-de-sac in Arcadia. If Robbie were feeling cooperative, it would be so simple to blaze up, open a portal, and run down some Dangerous Game in the hills. But with one of them fighting the transformation, going Ghost Rider was entirely impossible.

He'd have to drive them to the national forest physically.

Eli could...probably overpower these guys. Robbie was in decent shape, and Eli had ghost strength. He wouldn't get another chance at a kill for a while; the kid was wise to him, keeping up better on his sleep, and getting sneakier at kicking him out, with practice. Even now, he was recovering from his panic attack. Eli wasn't sure he'd make it to the mountains. No way he'd have time to play with them when he got there. He changed lanes and gunned the motor.

The engine fucking died in the middle of the freeway. It gave a horrific clunk and froze. Eli stomped on the clutch and glided forward while a minivan rear-ended him, whiplashing everyone in the cabin. The bent steel hurt like having his fingernails peeled off. Eli frantically twisted the key in the ignition, but it wouldn't start, the fucking kid wouldn't let it start, and then Robbie lashed out from within the car while he was distracted, senses shuttering like a bag over his head, and it was over.

 _Fuck you,_ Robbie sneered. Started the ignition, downshifted, roared away, leaving a pile-up behind him.

“Everyone okay?” he asked.

“Yeah. Yeah. What was that?”

“Engine trouble. I'll take a look as soon as I get home. You guys want to get another driver?”

“No, no,” Simon said, cradling his neck. “Junior, you good?”

“Man, I just want this day to be over.”

“Alright, we got two more stops and then we'll sack out.”

They arrived at the cul-de-sac house in Arcadia.

“Hang on, I'll get your bag for you,” Robbie said, sparking up and leaning under the steering wheel so the pax couldn't see what he was doing. Fucking Eli cooperated with him, because he didn't like the feel of the bag thumping around inside the front tire any more than Robbie did. He shoved his arm into the car and pulled the bag out. Junior opened it up and inventoried it again.

“Man, you're a life-saver,” he said. “That was above and beyond. I love Uber.”

“Don't mention it.”

They finished the deliveries without Eli murdering Robbie's pax. A banner day. Robbie dropped them off at the same modest adobe house they'd started from. “I don't know how to thank you, guey,” Simon said, shaking his hand. He gestured at Robbie's crumpled rear bumper. “And what happened to your car. I mean. I feel awful. Such a classic, and they're rare, right? Hollywood crashed most of 'em shooting action movies?”

“I can fix it,” Robbie said wearily.

“Junior, gimme the bag,” Simon said. He pulled out an envelope full of money and handed Robbie a wad of twenties. Five of them.

“Thank-you sir. Have a wonderful day.”

“I'll do my best.” As they turned to leave, Robbie lifted his head and squared his feet. “Hey, wait.”

Simon turned around, looked him up and down with a closed-off expression. Junior paused and looked over his shoulder.

“I don't know what you do,” Robbie said, “and it's not my business. But don't do it in Hillrock Heights.”

“I appreciate the save, man, but after that tip I just gave you, you don't get to go around making demands,” Simon told him. “Go home.”

Robbie shrugged, rested his hand on the roof. “Ever hear of La Leyenda?”

Junior swallowed, nudged Simon in the elbow.

“I'm just telling you,” Robbie continued. “He's real. He's particular about that neighborhood. Be a shame if you wound up in traction.”

“Yeah, whatever,” said Simon, with a curious look at Junior. They disappeared into the house. Robbie stared down at the car's aching bumper for a long time.

**Come on. Ghost up so we can fix it. This shit hurts.**

_I know._

Robbie drove home, his right rear fender stabbing into his tire at every bump.

 

* * *

 

Robbie kept the Rider stuffed down for eight days.

He took the bus to and from Canelo's, claimed he was cleaning out the carburetor, then that he was waiting on a rare part. Couldn't let the guys at the shop see the damage; they already thought he was losing it.

He pounded the errant edge of the right rear fender with a hammer so it stopped cutting his tire. Then, hands shaking, he left it like that. Picked up pax like that. Ate, worked, read comics with Gabe, slept like that, with the rear bumper and the quarter panels and the frame all bent and off-kilter.

 **What're you doing, kid,** Eli hounded him. **You proving a point? This is hurting you as much as it hurts me. Maybe more.**

**The silent treatment, okay. Fine.**

**Come on. You gotta light up sooner or later.**

He developed phantom pains all over his body. Or real pains, some of them—he limped, and because of the limp, his opposite hip ached, and because of his hip, his back seized up, and because of his back, he got migraines. He tossed and turned at night, feeling the creak and whine of tension in the tortured metal. His right foot went numb whenever he sat down.

**Pop an aspirin, Jesus.**

Food sat in his stomach. He ate unseasoned pasta and little bites of rotisserie chicken.

You, me, and this car, we're one and the same, Eli had told him multiple times. He wondered, as he waited for a pax to stagger out of a sports bar, if the car was the only real body he had left. He rubbed his fingers where engine grease had gunked itself deep into his calluses. Eli had never shown any real talent for healing. His body just...burned away and reconstructed itself, mint condition. His hair still grew. He'd tattooed himself one day, just a sewing needle and a dot of ink from a Bic pen, a tiny X inside one elbow to see if he could. It stuck around. But maybe his hair just grew because he expected it to. Maybe he was just a mass of ghost goo wrapped around dry, charred bones, playing at life.

His phone chimed. Not Uber. Facebook. One of Alex Northwick's friends had accepted his friend request. Robbie set his phone down. He'd briefly forgotten Candace in his fight with Eli. He sent some other requests to the friends of Alex he hadn't yet covered.

 **You've made your point,** Eli said after a night of poor sleep for both of them.

_Remind me what that was. I have a headache and it's hard to concentrate._

**Smartass little shit. Okay. No killing people you don't approve of.**

_Because?_

**Because you are a fucking masochist and I am not.**

_I'm so glad we understand each-other._

**Now can you please put on Cop Radio and find us someone to beat on.**

_Just as soon as we finish this fare._

“Sonrisa,” 4.4, and her two girl friends stumbled out of the bar. “You my Uber? I'm Sunny.”

“Eliot.”

“Omigod, what happened to your car?”

“Long story.”

 

* * *

 

Cop Radio didn't give them anyone to beat on, but Ghost Rider never needed an excuse to go blasting through quiet suburbs at three in the morning, shooting flames a hundred feet in all directions and going 120 in a 25 mile per hour zone. Except for the post-Ghost hangover, all Robbie's physical symptoms disappeared overnight.

Two days later, while taking his tenner at Canelo's, Robbie checked his phone and saw that two more of his friend requests had been accepted. Armed with three points of contact, he finally sent a request to Alex Northwick. When he left, he checked his phone one last time and saw to his surprise that Alex had friended him only a few hours later. He rushed home so he could research Alex on his laptop instead of using up precious data.

**Hello, Alex Northwick, MD, FACS. Half a million bucks of medical and surgical training packed into his head. Kid, the only fees that high go for world leaders. That shows you how stupid killing him would be.**

_Lemme concentrate._

Alex Northwick's profile pic showed himself, shirtless, with a mountain peak in the background. He had a runner's rangy build, a full head of wavy reddish-brown hair, a wide mouth, and deep crows-feet at the corners of his eyes. His banner showed a male Bighorn sheep silhouetted against a cloudy sky. Like Candace's banner, an amateur shot. Alex was forty-one years old to Candace's twenty-six. Graduated from Dartmouth College in 1999, then UC Irvine School of Medicine in 2003. That left a long gap until he started his surgical fellowship at East Los Angeles Medical Center in 2009. His profile didn't help fill it. As Robbie scrolled down through reblogs, musings, and photos, looking for March 11, he noticed that Alex had a pretty active vacation schedule for a guy whose fiance had just died. Maybe he was trying to distract himself from his grief.

His scrolling landed on Alex seated next to a dead brown bear in the middle of the woods. Alex was almost unrecognizable in camo paint. Propped up against the bear was a compound bow and a quiver of arrows.

**Guy's got some brass balls.**

-Anchorage. Smooth flight. Classy waitstaff. Great to be back in rough country! Peace—A.

The photo was from August. There were a smattering of likes, and a couple comments about the size of the bear.

Further down, more photos. Views taken from the flight, looking down on high mountains. A shot of a woman's calf in low heels and black nylons against industrial carpet—a flight attendant.

-I call this one Stacy. All grown up—don't need the mom—A.

Back and back. A shot of a cloud Alex thought looked like Serena Williams. A dead, bristly wild hog hanging out of the back of an Escalade next to a grinning, short-haired dog in body armor. Two more dead, bristly wild hogs, Alex between them, giving them a hug like passed-out drinking buddies, and a different armored dog. A bathroom selfie of Alex unironically posing shirtless in bicycle shorts, showing off a tattooed arm-cuff of animal claws. A dead raccoon in the back of the Escalade. An extreme close-up on a pair of jade cufflinks. A dead spider, lovingly spread out on a paper towel in Alex's palm. Weird, opaque memes about going to the gym, and memes whose pictures were derived from porn. A dozen iterations of “It's so fucking big.”

And then:

-Alex Northwick and Candace Gutierrez are no longer in a relationship. March 15, 2016, 8:17 PM.

That was all. An automated message and a broken heart icon. The date was three days after Candace's body was logged at the hospital, and a couple days before Mrs. Gutierrez remembered being called about Candace's effects.

**Hear-say. It's just Iris's word what her mother said she was told.**

Now they were back in time to when Candace was alive.

Another dead pig in the back of the Escalade. Dated February 25.

Where was Candace?

There. There. Posed on a balcony overlooking the city, Candace smiling up at the camera in a beaded, low-cut yellow gown, one leg peeking through a Jessica Rabbit thigh-high slit. Elbow-length white satin gloves. Bust up, one arm on one cocked hip, the other trailing gracefully over the railing.

**Nice shot.**

_I don't want to hear it._

**No. Listen. Nobody looks that good in a photo by accident. This has got to be one of twenty different shots of this girl. I bet all the other photos are the same.**

The other photos of Candace were not all the same, but there were plenty of serene, gorgeous, full-body shots of her in different expensive outfits. The other shots of Candace were odd. Close-ups. Just her ringlets, in one, against the blue sky. Her shoulder. Her cheek. Her toes. Parts.

-Nobody touches my cinnamon girl but me—A.

More dead pigs. A dead Bighorn sheep. An elk, killed with a bow and arrow.

There were also shots of other girls. Nameless legs, arms, hair.

-Saw a good one in the Dallas terminal. Think she's part native—A.

Weird rants about gender politics.

-Don't know why young men spend so much time and energy in an attempt to become Alpha. You walk the walk, Alpha will find you—A.

Posts about work.

-Awesome night. Got to sew some bimbo's entire face back on. Fingers crossed that it sticks! Use your seatbelts, kids—A.

Posts about sex.

-When the one so tight—but the other so much tighter!! *thumbs-up*—A.

Back and back and back. The same Christmas pictures that Candace had, Alex with his arm around her in front of perfect, professionally decorated trees. Those were the only pictures of Alex and Candace together. All the others were selfies, pictures of Alex with hunting trophies, and meticulously posed or secretive shots of Candace, in whole or in part.

**So he's got a predatory personality. He hunts. Some people paint.**

_You're right. There's nothing here that proves he killed her._

**Oh, so you want proof. Mister “what's in the cooler” needs proof. If proof was all you need—we could be taking contracts right now. We could be raking in money and killing scumbags every month. But you want to make this personal. You're just trying to work up a good head of steam so you can finally bust your nut.**

_That's not what I'm doing._

**Well, explain it to me in small words, 'cause that's how it looks from my end.**

Outside, there was the squeal of pneumatic brakes, the rattle of a folding door. The bus. Robbie minimized his browser and stalked outside to get Gabe.

By the time he was halfway down the driveway, Gabe was picking his way down the steps on his forearm crutches. The rubber caps on the ends were starting to wear through; Robbie made a mental note to order new ones. “Robbie-Robbie!” Gabe shouted, struggling against the weight of his backpack. Robbie wished, again, that he would take his damn power chair. He hated seeing his happy little brother so shaky when he came home. “In school, I made a book! So did everybody. I made my own comic book! For you. I love you!”

“Wow, that's great, buddy,” Robbie said. “Let's get you inside so you can sit down.”

“I used the stapler,” Gabe said proudly.

“Awesome.”

They crossed the threshold and Robbie helped Gabe disentangle himself from his crutches and backpack. Gabe unzipped it immediately and pulled out a sheaf of butcher paper. “I made this for you, Robbie,” he said, pressing it into Robbie's chest.

“Thanks, Gabe,” he said distractedly. What if Eli was right. What if he _was_ investigating Candace's love life so as to get some sick enjoyment out of finally letting Eli kill someone. In that case, it wasn't about Candace at all, it was about assuaging Robbie's guilty conscience, fooling himself he was a decent person.

He hadn't even found real proof that Alex was a domestic abuser. Was he really going to make Eli kill some surgeon on nothing but a bad feeling and hear-say? Did it even matter anymore? Candace was already dead. According to Iris's story, Alex had taken years to kill Candace, and according to Facebook, Alex didn't have another victim in mind. It might be best for everyone that Alex just...live his life.

 _If I can prove he covered up her death, that'll be enough._ Robbie set Gabe's book down on the table, sat back at his laptop, and opened the folder where he'd kept the forms and records he'd stolen from the hospital.

“Robbie, time to make mac'n'cheese?”

“In a minute.” He looked at the Coroner's report. Dead. 3-12-16, vehicular trauma to the head. Everything was there, everything was signed. The medical jargon looked legit.

“Robbie, time to make tamales?”

“We don't have any tamales. My friend from work made them just once.”

“Robbie?”

He looked up. Gabe was staring at him, eyes wide, from the chair. He felt dirty. “Why don't you go play with Ninja Wolf for a bit, okay, buddy?”

Gabe nodded and whirred away toward his bedroom, eyes low.

Coroner's report, medical examiner's report, intake report, DOA. Death certificate. Identification of the body. Release of the body for the advancement of medical science. Man, there was a lot of paperwork when someone died. It was all there.

**This is all the same handwriting.**

Robbie looked closer. Eli was right.

Oh, there were efforts made to disguise the writing. Block print at the top of each page that petered out into the same crabbed, idiosyncratic hash halfway down. Some signatures in choppy style, some in loopy style. **None of these signatures was even practiced. You can see where the pen stops and starts. They're not even close to smooth.**

_He didn't have any help. He just...found the forms and filled them out._

**Fudged the witnesses' signatures.**

Robbie ran his finger over the screen, the signature for “Ishtar Gutierrez.” He couldn't even get his future mother-in-law's name right. _Fudged everybody's signatures._ He heard Gabe clumping around again on his crutches. Hoped he was keeping busy.

_I guess he could have had help. Maybe._

Robbie bit the last bullet he'd been saving and pulled up Candace's medical records. They were sparse, for as many bruises as she'd had, but there in 2014 was a series of entries about a cast, all stemming from a visit for a broken arm. Fell down the stairs, the intake notes read. Injured approximately 20 hours before presentation.

Alex Northwick had been the consulting surgeon. He'd planned the treatment and pain medications, seen the X-rays.

Robbie paged earlier and earlier. Down to 2011 when she'd suffered broken ribs and collarbone in a T-bone collision, and Alex Northwick was listed as the attending critical care physician. And then he stopped.

An exterior door opened and shut.

_He knew._

**?**

_He treated her for the arm that he broke. He knew how far he was going._

**Well. He did graduate from medical school. He's got to have some concept of cause and effect.**

He went back to the release of the body for the advancement of medical science, where someone had signed Esther as Ishtar. Scrolled through long pages of boilerplate. He found a second page with handwritten notes. Checkboxes. Antebrachium+hand was checked, R and L. Elbow was not. Crus+foot R and L were checked, not the knees. Torso was checked, also hip, R and L, and shoulder, R and L. Head was not. There was a note on the box for the head that read _discard due to damage._ It was the very same jagged writing that filled the rest of the forms.

Robbie closed the PDFs and medical records and returned to Alex's Facebook wall. Deeper down the rabbit hole, more bloody trophies, more bits of women, more posed pictures of Candace like he wanted to preserve her in lucite. More shirtless selfies.

**Wait. What was that door?**

“Gabe?” Robbie snapped the laptop shut.

No answer.

He rose. Tripped over the power cord. Checked Gabe's room: empty. The power chair unoccupied, the crutches and the backpack missing.

Robbie called Gabe's Jitterbug and heard it ring from under the pillow.

The fire came, distorting his vision and bubbling under his skin. “ _Eli!_ ”

 **Wow,** Eli drawled. **I had absolutely nothing to do with this.**

Robbie burned up, panic and haste numbing him to the pain, and in an instant he was a black burning monster of steel and bone, some freakish car-ghost hybrid whirling frantically in his brother's room. He dove through the shadow cast by Gabe's door and into the car, roared into motion, circled the darkening streets, up and down alleys, weaving through red lights, phasing through any cars that didn't get out of his way.

_I don't see him. Can you sense him somehow?_

**Not how that works. How the fuck does Tiny Tim move so fast?**

They passed a bus. Eli hit the brakes, throwing up splashes of sparks and burning rubber. When they pulled up alongside, Robbie jumped the Rider out through the roof and landed on the bus, gripping on with two ball-pein hammers jammed through the steel like climbing picks. He scanned the terrified passengers. No Gabe. Dropped flat on his back through the hood of the car. They left the bus behind, widening their circle.

_Where did he go. Why did he—_

**I hate to say this, but we forgot to call the cops.**

_Right._

They screeched into a service alley full of trash cans and piles of wooden pallets. Robbie rolled out of the car and ripped at his faceplates, closed his vents, tried to snuff himself out. Let out a frustrated, rumbling roar.

**Chill. Chill. Deep breaths.**

_I don't have any fucking lungs!_

**Fake it 'till you make it.**

Robbie coughed out rivers of flame as he kept trying to rip his own face off, working leather-skinned fingers under the steel, vision filling with fire and steam and the crumbling pavement of the alley, because he didn't have any fucking eyelids right now either. He screamed again. Forced his ribs to suck down air, held it, fire still streaming out through his vents and his sockets and the gap behind his clenched teeth.

Breathed again. Again.

At last his body poured back over him, dousing him down, hissing and bubbling against his bones. Flesh filled his gloves. His faceplates shrank down under new skin, leaving nothing but scars. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. His real heart raced, his real lungs heaved. He was still inside Ghost Rider's skin, the black racing jumpsuit. His phone was in his real pants. Not the leathers.

 **Here we go again. One more time.** Eli stoked up the fires in the base of his skull, and Robbie boiled away his body again. Punched a crater in the pavement. **Concentrate. You need to turn all the way back. You want the phone.**

It was less difficult the second time. Robbie's body was weaker, though, and he dropped to his knees and face-planted into his tantrum crater. He rolled onto his back and dug his phone out of his pants.

“911, what's your emergency?”

“My brother is missing. His name is Gabriel Reyes, he's fourteen years old, five-foot-five, ninety-seven pounds, brown hair, green eyes. He uses crutches. He has a developmental disability but he will talk to you. He knows his address, he knows my phone number, he's really trusting and he needs help.”

“How long has he been missing?”

_Eli?_

A nudge. “ **Ten minutes.** ”

“Have you thoroughly checked your home?”

**Yes you half-witted bitch!**

“I heard the door open and shut.”

“Where was he last seen?”

Robbie gave his address.

“I'll advise our police patrols to keep an eye out for him, but...many of them are occupied responding to a potential supervillain sighting in your area.”

“Supervillain? What fucking supervillain?”

“I can't comment on that. I recommend you stay safe indoors and search your home for anywhere you might not have looked. It's very common for children to play hide and seek.”

“What—who? _What supervillain?_ ”

“I have all your information and I'll notify the police to keep an eye out for your brother, okay, hun?”

She hung up.

Robbie stuffed his phone back in his pocket when he noticed the case starting to melt.

**We're the supervillain.**

Robbie opened the driver's door and sat down. Drank one of his water bottles.

**...We should check the new high-rise across the street from the pharmacy.**

_Why?_

**We just should.**

Robbie put the car in gear and hummed off, holding the fires down. Wouldn't want to distract the cops.

Gabe had run off only once before, that spring, and that time it was Eli's doing. It was worse this time. Last time, Lisa had been with him and Robbie had had to hold it together for her. Not that he'd done a fantastic job, especially after she'd started to cry. This time it was just him and Eli, who couldn't be trusted not to run over a puppy, and bad memories, and an entire year of chaos and money trouble and gang warfare and being possessed by his evil ghost.

They pulled up to the curb at the office building Eli indicated, left the car idling half-way onto the sidewalk.

**Elevator up.**

They rode all the way to the fifteenth floor, got out into a hallway. No Gabe, just a woman in a skirt-suit and another woman in khakis. Door after door, and Robbie circled the top of the building. A small legal agency. A physical therapist. A graphic design studio. Everything clean and new, smelling faintly of fresh glue and paint. No Gabe.

**Guess they finished putting in all the windowpanes. Check the roof.**

_What the fuck?_ Robbie bolted to a door that read Roof Access. Locked.

**Oh, good.**

“Why'd we come here, Eli?” Robbie demanded to thin air in the middle of a crowded elevator going down.

 **I showed Dumbo a good time here once,** Eli replied.

Robbie went still and the other occupants of the elevator backed away from a blast of invisible heat. “ _Did you make him jump off the roof._ ”

**He had fun. He was fine. He was Ninja Wolf. Remember?**

Robbie remembered what happened when you took Eli's evil ghost powers and Gabe's imagination and stuck them in a blender. It was horrifying. But it absolutely could have survived jumping off the roof.

**It was months ago. I'm bonded to you now, we're exclusive. Let it go.**

Robbie's phone rang. He dug it out. It was Mrs. Valenzuela.

“ _Hello?_ ” he barked.

“Roberto, I just let the dog out and I found Gabriel hiding under my juniper bushes—”

The call cut off as the phone's battery exploded into flames.

Robbie let out a wheezing breath and leaned his head against the door of the elevator, pointing the phone down and away from himself at the carpet while it shot white-hot sparks of lithium like a five-dollar Fourth of July fountain. He shook with silent sobs of relief. Everyone else in the elevator had crowded against the opposite wall.

**Watch it, this bitch is gonna try the emergency stop.**

Robbie turned just as a young woman swung her hand toward the button.

“ _No,_ ” he snarled, catching her by the wrist.

She gasped and jerked away, tried to stick her entire wrist in her mouth. The skin was red.

“Oh, no,” Robbie said. “No, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I didn't know. I gotta go get my brother, he was missing. I gotta get out.”

“What are you, some kinda mutant?” a man demanded.

“Sure,” said Robbie. The phone finally ran out of fuel and he stuck it back in his pants.

The elevator arrived at the ground, and Robbie stormed out the door before anyone had time to ask the security guards to stop him. He burned rubber back to Hillrock Heights, just one block away from the Reyes' house. He pulled in to Mrs. Valenzuela's driveway at a crazy angle, then tried to fling himself out through the door without opening it and hit the window with his head.

**Breathe.**

_Okay._

Gabe did not need him to show up batshit terrified and cooking along at three hundred degrees. Blood ran down his left eyebrow from where he'd split it on the door. He pressed on it with his palm and breathed slow and deep into his other fist. When he felt his heart slow, felt his plates stop trying to push out from under his skin, he opened the door and got out.

He knocked on the Valenzuelas' flat green door. Waited fifteen seconds. Knocked again.

Footsteps, the creak of cheap wood floorboards. The light at the peephole shadowed as someone looked through.

Robbie squeezed his hand against his eyebrow and made himself smile.

Mr. Valenzuela was tall and straight, while his wife was short and round. She drove the bus and did some of the physical therapy offered at the Patrick Welman Development Center. Robbie didn't know what Mr. Valenzuela did. He could tell Mr. Valenzuela didn't like the look of him, as he stared out, backlit, through the door. He was blocking the door from opening further with his foot.

Mrs. Valenzuela called from deeper in the house. “Is that Roberto?”

“Es un gamberro,” Mr. Valenzuela growled suspiciously.

Robbie tried to fix his smile so it looked a little less hysterical.

“Jorge! Roberto is a kind, responsible young man! Let him in.”

Robbie had never seen the inside of Mrs. Valenzuela's house. The air smelled good, like simmering pork and chiles instead of cigarettes or must, and the furniture was clean and neatly arranged. But not much newer or nicer than Robbie's own house. Just more layered, more thoughtful.

Mrs. Valenzuela was in the kitchen. Gabe was sitting at the table, upright, a cup of hot chocolate with marshmallows in front of him. Robbie's eyes blurred with tears of relief and his throat locked up. He waved. Gabe stared back.

“Sit, sit down,” Mrs. Valenzuela said. She wet a paper towel in the sink. “What happened to your head?”

Robbie shrugged and pressed the towel to the cut.

“Are you all right? As I understand it, you and Gabe were robbed?”

He stared at her blankly. She spooned cocoa mix into a new mug and poured water in out of the still-steaming kettle.

“He said there was someone else in the house and you were...I couldn't get that part.”

“He was on the bottom,” Gabe said, still staring at Robbie with hard eyes and making it sound like he'd walked in on Robbie being raped. “He couldn't get up and he wasn't Robbie. He was Conscience.”

“What?” Robbie asked weakly. In his head, Eli was alert, silent.

“Like Gipsy Danger,” Gabe continued, naming one of the Jaeger robots from Pacific Rim. “But if someone stole her.”

 **Oh.** _**Oh.** _ **Heh-heh. Oh, boy. Wow.**

“But I _was,_ ” Robbie protested, reaching across the table. Gabe drew his hands back. “I was, I was right there—”

“Gabriel, if there was a bad man in your house, you did the right thing by getting to safety,” Mrs. Valenzuela interrupted. “Roberto, have you spoken to the police yet?”

“That's _not_ Robbie.”

“I am!”

“Has he been getting his seizure medication?”

“I didn't have a seizure!” Gabe yelled. His arm hit the table and the hot chocolate sloshed. “Conscience, go away! I want Robbie!” Gabe started to cry. He'd never been a screamer-and-kicker; he'd always hated to make other people upset. So it was always horrible to watch, to see him draw into himself and fold sideways over the arm of Mrs. Valenzuela's kitchen chair, sobbing into the crooks of his elbows.

Robbie froze in his seat. He wanted to get up, but he couldn't. Eli was a weight in his head, a mountain, a grave—not holding him back, but just being there, teetering. The force and shame of him could crush Gabe if they got near. Mrs. Valenzuela gave Robbie a confused look, and stepped over to rub Gabe's thin back. “Robbie,” Gabe sobbed. “I want Robbie.”

Mrs. Valenzuela jerked her head at him, and Robbie got up. He knelt on the floor next to Gabe's chair.

“I'm here, Gabe,” he said, hoarse, his head spinning. “I'm right here. It's me. I promise. I love you. Please let me hug you.”

“Robbie?”

“Yeah.”

“Robbie-Robbie?”

“It's me. I promise it's me. I love you so much, buddy.”

“ _Robbie_.” Gabe tipped himself out of the chair and caught himself around Robbie's shoulders, his arms wiry, hard from weeks of going to school on his crutches. Robbie hugged back like Gabe could be snatched from him at any moment. How long had he been carrying this, he wondered. How long had he planned this. To sneak out of the house, on his own power because his chair could be stolen, and find the nearest adult he trusted—because he couldn't trust Robbie.

Mr. Valenzuela entered the kitchen, quietly in his sneakers. He handed his wife a crocheted blanket and she wrapped it around Gabe and Robbie where they huddled on the floor.

It was only seven o'clock when they picked themselves up to go home. It felt like days since Gabe had disappeared.

“Were you or were you not robbed in your house?” Mr. Valenzuela asked as Robbie picked Gabe up piggy-back, Gabe's crutches in his hand. Gabe had his face practically stuffed down Robbie's collar. Robbie wasn't ready to give up any physical contact just yet.

“No, sir. I hit my head getting out of my car.”

“Are you boys going to be okay?” Mrs. Valenzuela asked. “I really think you should sit up with him tonight. And try to think back on your day for anything that could have triggered this.”

“I'll do that. Thank-you so much, Mrs. Valenzuela. I don't know what I—thank-you. For everything.”

“Happy to. I'm just glad he's getting home safely.”

“Not a baby,” Gabe groused.

“No, you're not,” Robbie agreed.

He helped Gabe into the car. Relaxed when he felt the warm weight of him in the passenger seat. Buckled him in, drove around the block and home.

When he and Eli had flamed up to go looking for him, their first circle through the neighborhood had completely overshot the Valenzuela house. No wonder they hadn't found him.

For dinner, they ate mac'n'cheese with peas and cut-up bits of hot dog.

“I made a comic in school today,” Gabe said, the pasta restoring his spent physical and emotional reserves much faster than Robbie's. “A comic for Robbie. I love you, Robbie.”

“Yeah. Yeah, buddy, I wanna see,” Robbie said, straightening from where he'd been slumped over his half-eaten bowl. Gabe pointed across the table at the sheaf of butcher paper and Robbie picked it up gently. The front page was a mess of black crayon, not figurative, but more like Gabe wanted the cover to be black paper and couldn't find any. Inside, he expected Ninja Wolf, or “Ninja Wolf's Best Friend.” But instead it was a diagram.

Black and silver crayon, with highlights of red and green here and there, and wavy yellow lines denoting airflow.

“Here's the Roots Blower, the air goes to the Supercharger, and the Supercharger makes Boost, see it's all thick here,” the yellow line turned squat and fat as a banana, “and the Boost goes to the Intake Manifold—”

It was a diagram of the Charger's air compression system, just as Robbie had explained it months ago when he'd brought Gabe to work with him during the summer. And it was all there. There were gaps, things Robbie hadn't gotten around to explaining, like valves and pistons inside the engine, where Gabe had elaborated and drawn hashes and stabs of yellow fire. Gabe's layout sprawled onto the next page, which folded out like a bonus poster in a comic book—it was thorough, and nothing was crammed together.

His motor skills had improved by leaps and bounds last year; the new meds left him less groggy _and_ eased his tremor, and on paper, when he could slow down and take his time, **this kid can fucking** _**draw.** _

“Gabe, this—wow. This is amazing.”

“Do you like it?”

“I love it.”

“I put extra pages.”

Robbie flipped past the air compression system to, as he had feared at first, Ninja Wolf and his Best Friend, the black-clad steel-skulled supervillain with his head on fire. There, below them, was the Hell Charger, also on fire. After that, the pages were blank.

“Robbie can draw comics, too.”

Robbie had never considered himself much of an artist, but if Gabe wanted, he would put his wooden-limbed scribbles on these pages with Gabe's exuberant character drawings—call up some excuse for hope and imagination— “I can draw how a carburetor works,” he offered.

Gabe giggled in excitement. Like he'd never been afraid of him at all. “Do it, Robbie! Kya-ha! So cool!”

Robbie got a pen out of the junk drawer and sketched a box and a tube and a funnel. “So the air flows through here and as it passes this bit, it sucks a tiny bit of gasoline into this channel—hang on, I'll get a straw and show you how it works.” He got a bendy straw and a glass of water and blew hard over the end of the straw until a thin spray of water crawled out and sprayed over the table. Gabe laughed again. “So now the fuel-air mixture goes into the intake manifold...”

 

* * *

 

The next day, Canelo didn't want him. Robbie called that morning, asked if he could come in and pick up some hours, and Canelo turned him down.

“We're finally staffed up again, but I mighta overshot it,” he said. “And Reyes—real talk here. This year, you've been weird and unreliable. First you want more hours. Then you want fewer. Then you try to pick fights with _Ramón Cordova._ I sympathize with your situation, and if we were booked full today I might have you come in. But this full-time, part-time, full-time bit does not make it easy to employ you.”

There was nothing Robbie could say to counter that, except, “I don't have a problem with Ramón Cordova anymore.”

Canelo breathed down the line. “That's what people say when they decide to get rid of their problem permanently.”

“Jesus! No! I really don't have a problem with Ramón! He made us tamales. They were really good.”

“Did you tell him thank-you?”

Robbie hadn't.

He couldn't well pick up Ubers with his phone looking like it'd been microwaved for a YouTube stunt. But as one of the perhaps three genuine strokes of good luck Robbie had ever had in his life, it was a newer model bought with racing money left over after paying off all his debts that spring, and it was still under warranty. He drove to the Android store to get it replaced. With the phone's case gone, no one could tell that the heat that triggered the explosion had come from outside, rather than within. Robbie presented the phone to the chagrined saleswoman.

“I've never heard of this happening with any of our models,” she said, turning the device over delicately. She pried open the back, having to peel it a bit where the plastic had melted together. “And this was a stock battery. Did you leave this in a hot car?”

“No, ma'am.”

“Good, because that wouldn't be covered. I can order a replacement that will be in next week.”

“Is there anything I can get today?” Robbie asked. “I need it for work. It's okay if it's not the same model.”

It took some convincing, but he managed to walk out with a refurbished smartphone. They even salvaged his sim-card.

At home, he set the phone back up the way he liked it, then left Uber off. After Gabe got home from school, they spent the evening in the garage leaning under the hood of the Charger, filling out the pages in Gabe's book.

At the end of the day, before bed-time, he called Mrs. Valenzuela.

“I need a favor,” he said.

There was a pause while she covered the receiver of the phone, possibly to sigh heavily over her dinner. “Tell me what it is.”

“Can I give Gabe your phone number? He already has mine, he knows to call when there's an emergency. He's had a phone since July, and he's only called me a few times. I can delete it if he bothers you.”

“No, no. I'm sure he'll be just fine. I'd be more concerned about the opposite, to be frank. What's going on?”

Robbie paced around the living room. “I've been having some...problems. I didn't think Gabe noticed, but he did. He got scared and that's why he came to you. I want him to have an adult he can talk to if he doesn't feel safe.”

There was another long pause. “Please give him my number, Roberto.”

“Thank-you so much, Mrs. Valenzuela.”

“Are you all right? Are you getting help?”

“I—”

“If you need to see someone, please come down to the Center yourself. We'd be happy to help you with paperwork, connect you with resources.”

**Got an old priest and a young priest? Heh-ha-hah. She's cute.**

_She's smarter than you ever were._ “Thanks. I'll take you up on that.”

**How?**

He hung up. Heard Gabe finish brushing his teeth.

“Hey, buddy,” he said, letting Gabe lean against his waist as he left the bathroom. He was shooting up; Robbie had had to lengthen his crutches this fall.

“Hi, Robbie,” Gabe said. When he reached the bed and sat down, he gave Robbie a searching look.

“It's me. It's Robbie.”

Gabe shuffled sideways on the bed, picked up Aquaman from the nightstand and handed it to him. Robbie straightened the figure's legs and moved his arms back and forth, wondering what Gabe wanted to do. He didn't look like he wanted to play action figures.

“Robbie-Robbie,” Gabe said, finally taking off his crutches and relaxing into the bed. Robbie got up to tuck him in.

“Gabe, I need to talk to you.” Gabe met his eyes. “I was trying to keep secrets from you and I'm sorry,” he said. Gabe grabbed for his hand and he held on. “I didn't want you to know because I knew you'd be scared. I made a mistake.”

“What secrets?”

 **Your “conscience,”** Eli supplied.

“I have a...Conscience.”

“The spirit of justice?”

_What the hell did you tell him? Bastard._

**You'd rather I tell him the truth? Scare the shit outta the—uh, him?**

“Yeah. He...may have...lied and said that was his name. And he, uh, you know how the robots in the movie where they fight the sea monsters, they have two pilots?”

“Crimson Typhoon had three pilots.”

 _God forbid._ “Well, people are supposed to just have one. I'm supposed to be the only pilot in here,” Robbie said, pointing to his temple. He clutched Gabe's hand and lowered his eyes. “But there's someone else here, too.”

“I know.”

Of course. “He's not very nice.”

“Oh.”

“He doesn't want to hurt you. He just doesn't really care. But I love you. So much. And I'm a lot stronger than he is. I want to stay in control all the time so I can take care of you and spend time with you.”

“Robbie's fighting?”

“Yeah,” Robbie said with a shaky nod. “I'm fighting all the time. 'Cause I love you, little bro. And if you ever get scared. If you think it's not me driving. You can call Mrs. Valenzuela. Don't run off like that again, please. Carry your phone wherever you go. Call her, and she can come get you.”

“No,” Gabe moaned, gripping Robbie's hand harder. “No, Robbie.”

“Please, please, Gabe. I have to know you're safe.”

“Don't go.”

“I won't go. I won't ever go. Even if the, uh, conscience takes me away, I'll always come back. I would be really, really sad if anything bad happened to you. Please.”

“I wish you were friends,” Gabe said. “I wish Conscience was a real spirit of justice.”

“Yeah. Me, too. Are you going to call Mrs. Valenzuela if you're scared?”

“Okay.”

“Promise?”

“I promise, Robbie.”

Robbie programmed Mrs. Valenzuela's number into Gabe's Jitterbug, showed him which button to push to call her. Then he kissed him goodnight and shut the light out. Hoped he hadn't just forever destroyed his little brother's sense of personal safety.

**What's the bus driver gonna do against me?**

_It's not her you need to worry about._

_I've been under a lot of personal stress, Eli. I don't have a lot of family—just Gabe and you. I also don't have many friends. Career opportunities don't look so rosy either._

_If you make me unsafe for Gabe to be around, if you separate us, I could very easily kill us both._

**What if I hurt his feelings?**

_You're misunderstanding me. If I can't take care of Gabe, I have no reason to inflict you on my community. I never wanted to “use our powers for good” or some bullshit. Everything good Ghost Rider has done was a byproduct. Pressure release._

**What if I put him on a Greyhound to Chicago?**

_Then I take a crowbar and smash the shit out of the car, and I go get him._

_You need me. Gabe is part of the package. Non-negotiable. You do not hurt him, you do not allow him to be hurt. You do not terrorize him, or neglect him. If Gabe is ever better off without me, then I will take us both to Hell._

**Jesus. Okay, you little psycho. I'll be nice to the runt.**

_Fantastic._

Just as he was dropping off to sleep, Robbie remembered to call 911 to let them know Gabe had been found safe last night.

 

As he carried pax and fixed cars later that week, Robbie pondered Alex Northwick. As far as he could tell, Alex had covered his murder, not by hiding the evidence of his crime, but by shuffling Candace in among the other, more expected deaths and then relying on over-worked administrative staff to ignore any anomalies, just like Robbie and Eli had slipped the Hell Charger past Uber's inspection.

 **I wonder,** Eli mused, as Robbie lay on a wheeled creeper under a Pontiac that was leaking brake fluid from somewhere. Something dripped on his forehead, and Robbie wiped it with a shop towel. **The morgue has to have security cameras.**

_You think he let himself get caught on camera?_

**He hunts bears with a bow and arrow. I think it's worth a look.**

They had to go back to the hospital. After finishing their shift, picking up Gabe, making dinner and seeing him safe in bed, Eli made Robbie dig out the sewing kit and tear a paper towel into little squares.

**Time for teleportation 101, kid. You gotta be sure of your target. Now with a big portal, with the car, there's some slop factor. Car'll blow anything it manifests inside to smithereens. But with a humanoid body, especially if you're trying for stealth, you need finer control. Two ways to do that: line of sight, and blood.**

_Blood?_

**Blood. You notice how easy it is to go straight to the car from wherever you might be—that's 'cause I bled over every single piece of her. Same with this house, and that garage: you probably had a few nosebleeds and injuries once upon a time. So. How I** _**intended** _ **this ability to be used. Prick your finger, bleed on these bits of towel, and then you plant them where you want to go.**

_What, plant our DNA right at the crime scene? Are you stupid?_

Eli paused. Robbie felt a tension in his sinuses. **What?** _**What?** _ **This—FUCK this future** _**bullshit.** _ **It** _**never fucking ends.** _ **Explain this to me, kid. Just. What. What now. Can they read our minds? Smell gunpowder on our hands a week after? Is there a Pre-Crimes squad now? There is. Isn't there. Fuck. Fuck.** _**Fuck** _ **. Okay, we plant the blood where we want to go, and then we pick it back up before we leave. Okay. This is fine.**

They still had to go back to the hospital.

Working together, Robbie and Eli managed to con their way past the front desk. They struck up anxiety-small-talk with an uninjured middle-aged woman cradling a potted Amarylis, and got her last name and the name of her daughter, who'd been in a car accident. After security let the woman up into the hospital, they used the bathroom, bought a cheap bouquet and a balloon at the hospital gift shop, and returned to wait on the other side of the expansive lobby. At the desk, they claimed to be the girl's brother. “Dad was...having some issues when he met my mom. But my sister and me, we're close anyway.”

They waited, tapping Robbie's foot and paging through a battered _Car and Driver_ , until reception waved them in.

That was the easy part. Neither of them had any clue where the security hub might be. They wandered up and down the halls, stopping whenever a nurse thought they were getting in the way.

“Where are you trying to go?”

“Oncology ward?”

The next floor.

“Surgical ward?”

The next.

“Cardia—Cardiology?”

Getting desperate. They popped the balloon and stuffed it in a pocket.

“Administration?”

Top floor. Around and around and around. Now they really looked lost, wandering around the admin level in Converse and a battered leather jacket, carrying a bouquet. **It's your mom's birthday,** Eli extemporized. **You never knew her. She abandoned you because you were an accident. Now, you've tracked her down. You have a deep, deep void in your heart that you believe only her love can fill, but you're terrified she has none to give! Hence the flowers. Tension is high. Will she take you into her arms? Or will she take one look at your weaselly face and the giant holes in your earlobes—Ah-hah!**

They stopped in front of a door labeled Security.

**Pick a name. Any name.**

Robbie knocked on the door. Waited. Knocked again. A confused-looking woman in a short-sleeved button-down shirt and an uncomfortable-looking utility belt answered the door. Behind her was a bank of computer monitors and a man in a similar uniform. **Bingo. Look at the belt, what's she packing?**

“Can I help you?”

“Hi, I'm looking for Gloria? Gloria Reyes?”

**The belt, numbnuts.**

She frowned. “You shouldn't be bothering one of the staff while they're at work. Leave a message with reception or I can escort you out.”

Robbie looked down at the bouquet in his hand, then back up into her eyes. “No, no, I'm not a stalker. She's my mom. She works here.” Wonder of wonders, the guard's eyes softened. “I haven't seen her in years, but I was in town...”

“Sorry, but I don't know her. Raul? You know a Gloria Reyes?”

As she looked back over her shoulder, Robbie examined her belt. It was wide, stiff, rode high around her waist. There was a hand-held radio and a big yellow plastic object— **Taser, nice—** on the left hip, a row of mysterious pouches across the front, and a pistol in a stout plastic holster on the right hip. **Look closer. There's a latch or somethin'—what** _**is** _ **that?**

“Nope,” said a man from inside the room, probably Raul.

**That holster's got a little button, or a latch, theft deterrent. Adorable. Where's the brand name?**

Robbie tried to spot a logo on the smooth gray plastic, but the woman was just turning around again. “Sorry,” she told him. “You should try HR, down the hall. We're security. We just look at cameras all day.”

“Okay,” Robbie said. “Thanks anyway.”

“Good luck, dude.” The woman smiled and shut the door as Robbie made as if to move on.

**There you go, everyone loves a mama's boy. Now pick your spot to port in from. A surveillance blind spot, somewhere that doesn't get cleaned.**

Robbie found the men's room on the Administrative level, locked himself into a stall, changed his mind, and went to the mirror. He pulled one of his bloodstained squares of paper out of his pocket, and a roll of scotch tape. He wedged it under the lip of the sinks, sharing the space with a dozen multicolored blobs of hardened chewing gum. Looked both ways as he left the men's room, and sighed in relief as he got onto a down elevator. Left the flowers propped up on a chair in the lobby in case anyone else needed them, then got the hell out of there.

 

* * *

 

Just after midnight, Ghost Rider rolled down out of a pool of fire and darkness onto the bathroom tile of the administrative floor's men's room. Peeled off the bit of blood and tape he'd homed in on, and ate it, a tiny burst of flame lost in the hiss of his breath..

He stood, turned to the mirror, stared at his reflection burning and glinting in the darkness, until the motion-detector lights turned on. Robbie concentrated, reached for the fires, and pulled them back in. Changing back was hard some days. For an instant, when the Rider's fires started to go out, he always felt like he was suffocating; then his flesh wrapped around hot bones, constricting, alien, agonized. When he wasn't thinking, the change could happen in a flash, sometimes without him even noticing, but over-think, and he burned alive for horrible seconds until it was complete.

Human again, he braced himself against the bathroom counter and breathed hard. Took a drink out of the faucet—the motion-detector kind, so for a second it didn't turn on and then when it did it sprayed all over his face. Grabbed some paper towels to dry off with.

**Now who's whining about DNA everywhere? Quit stalling. You'd think you were gonna rob a bank.**

Robbie didn't own a lot of hats, wasn't a fan of hat hair. He put on a pair of cheap mirrored sunglasses from Good-Will, secured at the back with a rubber band. No good leaving a witness description reading “Hispanic male, 5'7”, one eye green and one orange;” that'd make a real short line-up. He'd left the leather jacket at home—too unique with the white inset design. No watch. Plain denim. Converse, but those were ubiquitous. He had a shop rag with a slit cut in it in one pocket; he tied it tight around his face with the slit open around the glasses, and it crushed his nose but hid the rest of his identifying features. He wore his winter driving gloves, the pair with full fingers.

 _I_ _**look** _ _like I'm gonna rob a bank._ With the mirrored lenses sticking out of the shop cloth, he looked like a bug in a burlap bag.

**Sometimes it pays to be upfront with your intentions. Let's go.**

Robbie left the bathroom and slouched down the dimly-lit hall to Security.

**Vague. Casual. But pissy.**

_I got this._ He pounded on the door. “I needta talk to you guys, can you open up a sec?”

One of the monitor guards cursed from within. “Who—what's going on?”

“I gotta talk to you, can you please just open up a sec?”

“Who is this?” The guard sounded annoyed, but closer. The handle began to turn.

**Here he comes! Gimme the wheel!**

_I got this,_ Robbie wanted to say, but it wasn't true, he hadn't got this. He'd never touched a gun while he was in charge of his own body, and while he'd thrown his share of punches, and been held down to take his share of punches, he'd never been the guy who did the holding. Eli was pushing at his hands, expanding inside his head, and Robbie knew this would go a whole lot smoother if he let Eli take over. That would mean trusting Eli with a gun.

Not happening.

But how hard could it be?

**You're 'bout ta find out.**

The door swung inward— **Stay out of sight behind the wall! Oh, dammit—** and a guard, a man this time, dark hair, forties, chin-strap beard to outline a chin long-since swallowed by his neck, looked down at Robbie. “Shit!” the guard said.

Robbie grabbed him by his shirt and tried to shove his way into the room— **No! No! Drag him out! That's your hostage!—** but the older man had over fifty pounds on him and he wasn't moving. “Miguel!” the guard called to his partner inside. “Some guy in a mask—” Robbie grabbed for the guard's holster, fumbled to push the button they'd noticed on the other guard's holster yesterday, that kept the gun locked in. He was at a bad angle. Couldn't make the button go. “Jesus!” the guard yelped. **Now you've done it.** The guard shoved Robbie away hard, knocking him against the door post, and then saved him the trouble of getting the gun from the trick holster by drawing it himself. “Stay where you are, hands above your head!” he bellowed, the exact same words and cadence as the cops used on every action show.

Robbie charged right at him. Whenever he looked down gun barrels anymore, it was always as the Ghost Rider. **You got him off-balance. Now let me! Let me take his gun!**

The guard shot him in the chest.

Robbie kept his momentum, crashed against the guard's belly inside his gun arm. At first he felt like he'd just been punched under the armpit. Then the noise registered, and the pain caught up to him. For an instant, he felt blind, deaf. The world went away under a rush of agony that seemed to come from the entire left side of his body, then retreated back to the injury itself, stealing all his adrenaline with it.

It was off-center, high on his ribcage, a bad spot but far from the worst possible. A broken rib. Weakness in his left arm. Blood oozing out near a little hole in his white hoodie.

“Jesus, did you just shoot him?” the other guard demanded.

**Get the gun! Lemme drive! I'll get the gun!**

“I didn't—he just jumped right at me—” The first guard spun Robbie around and shoved his face against the wall inside the computer room.

“Was he even carrying anything? A knife or something?”

The first guard reached for Robbie's mask.

 _No._ Robbie swung his elbow back. Pain was a white thunderclap in his head as the muscles of his chest tugged. He spun around and saw the gun, rising again, in his face. _Fine. Eli._

 **You're welcome.** Eli grabbed hold of his body and grabbed the guard's gun in a single motion. Wrapped his hand around the barrel, twisted it hard to the side, broke the man's finger inside the trigger guard, and yanked it free. Kicked the guard in the chest to make up some distance, and twirled the gun on one finger and sighted it between his eyes. “ **Take your belts off and dump 'em on the floor,** ” Eli ordered. “ **Or the fat one gets it.** ”

_Nobody gets hurt, I told you—_

_**I'm** _ **hurt. I** _**hate** _ **getting shot. Hell, he deserves to lose his whole hand for his trigger discipline alone.**

“ **This is a stick-up,** ” Eli continued, grinning so wide Robbie tasted the shop cloth in his mouth. “ **You make trouble, you go down the incinerator shaft. Got me?** ”

“Alright, alright,” the second guard, Miguel, said, hands raised. The first guard was busy cradling his broken index finger and whimpering. “Look, I'm taking my belt off right now, see?”

“ **Congratulations, you are smarter than a fifth-grader. Kick it to me.** ”

Miguel shoved the belt, with its radio, pistol, Taser, and mysterious pouches, toward Eli with the toe of his shoe. Eli crouched down, pistol still trained on the other guard, and started disarming it—powered the radio off, unholstered the pistol, ejected the magazine, and racked the slide awkwardly against the heel of Robbie's shoe in case there was a bullet in the chamber. Hurt like hell to do it all with his left hand.

“ **Now him.** ”

“He's hurt, let me help him—”

“ **Naw.** ” Eli got the Taser free. It was a chunky, futuristic thing, all black-and-yellow plastic, all its weight in its thick handle, the trigger squared off, with a straight, heavy pull. He shot the first guard in the chest. Needles and wires spiralled out, stabbed in through the guard's layered shirts, and the Taser's handle vibrated with the snap-snap-a-snap of high-voltage alternating current. The guard arched back and convulsed, arms and legs jerking and kicking with each electric crackle. Urine spilled. When the Taser automatically shut-off, the guard heaved in a breath and started sobbing. Eli cackled.

“Pinche cuello!” Miguel made a grab to pull the taser wires out, and Eli shifted the pistol's sights onto him.

“ **No-no.** ”

“You sadistic fuck!”

_Eli!_

**I love this thing!** “ **Fatty's hand don't bother him no more, see?** ” Eli tried to give the Taser's trigger another squeeze—for dramatic effect—but Robbie stopped him: the kid was concentrating, trying to peel control away from him. His hand was going numb, pins and needles; the kid was going to make him drop the Taser. That would not improve their command of the situation. The humiliating thing was, whenever they'd fought over the body like this, the kid had eventually won.

This was not what Eli had envisioned for his second life.

“ **Fine,** ” he snarled. “ **See how you manage, you neurotic little bitch.** ” And he let the body go.

Robbie found himself with a gun in one hand and a Taser in the other, trying to juggle two hostages. “Thanks. Eli,” he bit out. He took a deep breath, lowered the Taser. Every movement of his left arm made the injured muscles of his chest drag and burn across his cracked rib. He carefully pulled a pack of heavy-duty zip-ties out of his pants pocket. They'd brought equipment and everything, Eli just kept arranging things so they'd have to get violent. “Put these on him,” he said to Miguel. **Behind the back. Behind!** “Behind his back,” Robbie growled. When he tossed the zip-ties to Miguel, the gun in his right hand wobbled. **Aim! It's not complicated, make the three little dots stand in a row. Not sideways, you look like you're on MTV!**

_I'm not actually going to shoot him!_

**This doesn't work if he can tell that by looking at your shitty grip!**

Robbie straightened the gun. He didn't actually sight down the barrel like Eli had. He wondered what he was supposed to do with his index finger. Was it supposed to be on the trigger, ready to go? Lower down on the grip? What if he pulled it by accident? These guards didn't deserve Eli tormenting them, or the Ghost Rider working out his frustrations on their bones. They certainly didn't deserve Robbie shooting them by accident because he didn't know what to do with a gun.

Miguel gently rolled his partner onto his stomach and cuffed him with two zipties.

“Step back, sir,” Robbie ordered. Miguel gave him a disbelieving look, then backed against the wall. Robbie knelt by the first guard, felt the zip ties. Seemed a bit loose.

**'Bout to fall right off.**

He tightened them. “Stay here. Nobody's supposed to get hurt.”

“You broke my finger, you fucker,” the guard at his feet wheezed. “You _tased_ me.”

Robbie couldn't muster a sympathetic response to that. “You shot me.”

“I'm sorry.”

Robbie lowered the gun toward the floor and jerked his cloth-covered head at Miguel. “I want footage. March 12, 2016. Midnight through eight a.m, from the morgue. Or...wherever the bodies get cut up.”

“What?” Miguel demanded.

“March 12, 2016. I want security footage from the morgue and anywhere else that processes dead bodies.” **You're the guy with the gun now, Robbie! He's stalling you, don't take that shit!** “ _Now_ , please.”

“That's months ago, it's burned to disk.”

“I want the disk.”

“It's not here.”

Candace Gutierrez' butcher was on that disk. Robbie's nostrils flared and the trigger shifted slightly under his finger. “I want the disk now.”

“It's in the records room.”

“Great. Let's go.” He waved the barrel of the gun at Miguel, like in the movies, and Miguel understood and lead the way down the hall to the other end of the administrative floor, where he unlocked a heavy fire-proof door. Inside were racks and racks and racks of DVD-ROMs. Miguel's hand shook as he traced his fingers up and down the columns.

“Here,” Miguel said at last. “This what you want?”

Robbie squinted at the little printed label. All security footage between midnight March 12 and midnight March 13. “March 11, too,” he demanded. “What format are these in?”

“Uh. MP4s.”

“Passwords?”

“Nothing.”

“Good.” Robbie took the jewel-cases and tucked them into his waist-band, close against his skin. His breath tasted like blood. He had an urge to cough that got stronger by the minute, and he suspected that when he finally did cough, the pain would leave him completely unable to defend himself. “Cuff yourself to that shelf now.”

Miguel hesitated. “What are you going to do?”

“Leave.”

He kept it together, training the gun roughly at Miguel's head while he zipped his left hand to one of the racks. As soon as Miguel was secure, he dropped the gun. Winced and waited for it to go off when it hit the floor, but nothing happened. Miguel watched him warily.

**He can reach the gun with his foot, dumbass. Bend down and pick it up.**

_What's the point?_

**The** _**point** _ **is, you do it half-assed, you make bad habits. You get bad habits, you get killed!**

_Not gonna be a habit._

Robbie clutched his throbbing left armpit and shuffled back to the bathroom, leaving the door to the records room open behind him.

**He can yell for help from there.**

_Wouldn't want him to suffocate._

**I should let** _**you** _ **suffocate,** Eli snarled as Robbie shut himself into the men's room. **You're a boy doing a man's job. You'd let me drive, I'd'a got that gun right outta the holster on the first try, commanded the situation, Fatty wouldn'ta even broke his finger. You need to trust me.**

“You Tased a man because you thought it was funny!” Robbie exploded. “He could've had a heart attack!”

**I never seen that happen.**

“I've never jumped off a bridge, but I know it's a bad idea!”

Eli sniggered in his head. **Okay. Real talk here. You know what it's like to die from a sucking chest wound?**

Robbie had a sudden premonition Eli was about to let him find out. _Do you hear sirens? I think I hear sirens._

 **You feel like you just ran ten miles through Denver, Colorado. Air-hunger. You think to yourself, oh. I'm tired. I'm breathing too fast. Next time I breathe, I'll do it real deep, slow, really get that air down in there. So you shift around. Really open up that chest, throw those shoulders back—hurts, but by this time you got bigger problems. Give it a good four seconds in, four seconds out—that's a joke, you can't make yourself go that slow. And breathing out—damn. Now that hurts. Like a stretch, or a pressure. Presses on your heart. Makes you weak. You get weak, you can't hold the right posture, the air-hunger gets worse. Now here's the thing—it only gets worse. The tightness, and the pressure, and the gurgling deep down where you're trying to inhale your own blood—not too useful, by the way—it goes up and down, but it's worse and worse. Until there's nothing. You** _**can't** _ **breathe. You're pumped up like an inner tube and there's no more room for your lungs. But that lizard-brain takes over, see, pumps you full of adrenaline, and you keep trying, like an idiot, making the pain worse, hauling those broken ribs up and down, and you wish you'd just pass out and be done with the mess, but** _**noooo...** _

_I apologize for getting shot,_ Robbie interrupted, stuffing down a twist of guilt. _Can we please get out of here before I get arrested, or shot some more?_

**Well, since you're so polite about it.**

They burned up, the pain of the gunshot wound vanishing under the familiar thunderclap of agony as all Robbie's flesh boiled away at the same time. The Rider straightened, spun on his heel toward the bathroom door—there were footsteps in the hall. He snarled, restrained himself, then crouched down under the bathroom sinks and dropped through the shadows into the Charger, parked at the curb two blocks away. They snuffed out.

**Well, that's done. Congratulations on getting yourself shot. Now do I get a thanks for pulling your fat out of the fire?**

Robbie ground his teeth, rubbed his pain-free left armpit, and dug the disks out from under his shirt. “Thanks,” he said, squinting at the dated stickers on the jewel-cases. “I hope these things don't have anti-theft software that'll broadcast our location as soon as I try to watch them.”

**You worry too much.**

“You sound like Alex.”

**That's harsh.**

 

* * *

 

Robbie couldn't sleep. He wasn't in the mood to pick up a pax. He booted up his laptop, disabled the LAN just in case, and put in the March 12 disk.

**Wow, they crammed a lotta data on here.**

Instead of just morgue footage, the disks contained all the footage collected from all the surveillance cameras throughout the hospital during each twenty-four hour period, midnight to midnight. Each camera had its own video file, and they were arranged by number, not the name of the room. He couldn't see any better way to find the morgue than to just open one file at a time, manually. Not the first thing he wanted to try.

Not all the files were videos. Some were spreadsheet data. Those, at least, promised to be search-able. Robbie found a file that logged all security badge usage throughout the hospital and opened it up in Excel, found the Northwick entries. On March 12, his badge had been used at the exterior door at 2:42, the north-east hallway door at 2:48, and the elevator to the basement at 2:51. In the basement, his badge was used at the morgue entrance at 3:02. It was used again, backtracking, at 4:31. Alex Northwick's badge, in and out.

**I'm starting to think someone framed this guy. This is...this is appalling.**

Nothing left but to brute-force through the video files. Hundreds of them. Robbie hoped they might be organized by floor number, but that would be too simple. No. They seemed to be organized by the date each camera had first been installed. He had to open up each file, look at the scene on the screen, move the slider back and forth through time if it was the kind of camera that scanned from side to side, and try to visually deduce whether or not he had found the morgue. The fact that neither he nor Eli had ever seen the inside a morgue didn't help. The files each took over a minute to load. He tried opening multiple files at the same time, but any more than three would crash his laptop. It was a godawful mess.

At four in the morning, he gave up and had a nap. He had a shift tomorrow.

The next morning, he had a brainwave. He couldn't correlate the cameras to the doors. But there was a camera at each entrance of each hallway, and at the elevator doors. The odds of someone else the same height and build as Alex Northwick passing through a hall door and an elevator at each of the times Alex's keycard had been used were slim. If someone had framed Dr. Northwick, Robbie would at least see the actual culprit.

The hospital had five floors, which meant forty hallway cameras and five or ten elevator cameras. He would need his own spreadsheet for this.

He brought his laptop with him instead of his textbooks the next time Nora hailed him for a shuttle ride. He charged the laptop off the car battery, which gave him eye floaters and a headache until he started the engine back up. It was deeply tedious and Eli handled tedium poorly.

 _Didn't you used to stalk people yourself when you were alive?_ Robbie demanded, after switching from Cop Radio to Oldies to Ranchera to Funk to Trap to Reggeaton to Jazz, trying to find something that would keep Eli quiet.

**It's worse when it's not me doing it.**

Nora had four appointments again. Robbie managed to screen a hundred and fifty videos while waiting for her to return from various hotels and motels. “You've been pretty reliable these few weeks,” she said at the end of the night. “I might give you a raise.”

Over the next week, he found all the hallway cameras and elevator cameras. In the process, he also found the morgue cameras. He scrolled through each elevator feed to 2:51, then each hallway feed to 2:48.

Some of the views were crowded. But he did find, just after the hallway badge log and just before the elevator badge log, a tall, lean man in scrubs and a surgical mask, his ID badge turned around backwards, pushing a shrouded figure on a gurney.

_Candace._

He screenshotted the man and the gurney. He hovered over one of the morgue camera feeds, now nestled in their own sensibly labeled file folder. But he didn't click it.

Instead he looked up the MySpace for DestinyDanger2001. It looked weird, custom-edited, an orange-and-teal border framing the upper left corner of the screen. An old pop song started playing as soon as the page loaded and he had to click the browser tab to turn it off. His cursor shed a trail of electric purple sparkles as he swished it back and forth over the page. Below the banner of three smiling women in blunt bobs, ran a series of text entries that had nothing to do with the early '00s.

 

  * Good day today, 8/10. A's mother called, and we spoke on the phone about the wedding, then she and A talked for two hours. A was in such a good mood after that. You can practically see the clouds lift, and when they do, he's so full of joy. Went out to our mountain and he was like a child seeing the trees for the first time. Kept up with him today—had a hunch and made an extra egg for myself. Cardio is paying off. Came home, talked in the Jacuzzi till midnight about his cases. Days like this I remember how lucky I am. A is so brilliant. He's a problem-solver and a visionary, tenacious and practical, and he's saved so many lives by being who he is. There's a light at the end of this all and I just have to see it through.

  * 5/10. Tried out new move from research, wanted to surprise him, should not have done that. A is very jealous. I can't tell what's jealousy and what's protective instinct. He has plenty of both. He is paranoid. Clinically. And the frustrating thing is that medication is out of the question, it would “fog up his brain.” Did not like that suggestion, will not repeat. Attached is the mark. Am almost out of body concealer, weather is heating up. Iron linen skirt. Love my linen skirt—goes all the way to the floor, breathes like CoolMax. Made Coho salmon with wild rice and asparagus today, A very pleased, I also liked it and not too difficult. Recipe follows...

  * 7/10. A needed to sight in 30-06's for boar hunting, only game to scratch his itch this time of year. Both of us went to the range. Lots of A's type around, so he was very content and focused on out-shooting everyone. Still having trouble shooting from the shoulder myself. Rifle is smaller, lighter, kicks harder than Alex's rifles. Cut eyebrow on the scope. I was panicking and Alex looked so worried, but I laughed it off and told him it would make me look tough. He said not so much, makes me look like I can't handle my own gun. “Oh, well,” I said. “Someone in this relationship should be humble.” That might have been too far but he was in a good mood by the end of the range session because he really can out-shoot most people. Especially me.

  * 8/10. A was very considerate. Brought chocolate ganache cake. This is A's problem. He thinks he can fix this with cake. Not discipline. He has no discipline, he has never had discipline. I don't know why I bother. I'm deep in the rabbit hole and he's dragging me down with him. He really thought I needed cake. Of course I ate it. This is the only time I'll cheat, is when he's had a tantrum and brings me apology cake. What is my life.

  * 3/10. Attached are marks. Not sure what happened today. Wish A came with error messages.

  * 6/10. Got in at Green Sky when another diner canceled. Threw on scarf and rushed out the door. A very excited. Dinner was educational. Wine very nice, A ordered white which is a nice change. Also ordered roses. A gentleman. My favorite version of A. I had to ruin it getting jealous of the waitress. A's tendencies rubbing off on me—he's clueless, he just talks to all women like that. Damn his father. A wanted to do it in the bathroom but I talked him out of that. Then to get it out of his system he insisted we do it in the garage. He twisted my scarf around his hand. Mark is attached—overlaps. Of course he knows what he's doing. No one can say he doesn't know what the human body can take. People can't help what they want. He has a string of long shifts starting tomorrow so I will have the house to myself.




A dozen entries in and Robbie still hadn't learned anything about Candace. All he'd learned about was Alex. Alex's moods, Alex's games, Alex's wants and needs. Candace was conspicuously absent, in her own diary, except for the clinical self-portraits in blue, green, and red. And then:

  * 3/10. No marks today but I am very angry and A is being a child. Fought about hair. Not A's second mortgage idea—hair. Anyone reading this, you can't see all my Junior High selfies trying to look like J-Lo and Beyoncé—the Internet is only forever if you're a celebrity so I can delete whatever I want. I used to have fun with my hair. Never did anything I couldn't undo, but I used to steal Mom's wigs and buy cheap ones and generally have a hell of a time being whoever I wanted to become in that moment, just with clothes and heavy eyeliner and a hairpiece. The wig is the greatest invention in the history of hairdressing. There are gorgeous pieces out there, “natural” if you want to be classy about it, or blow-your-eyes-out neon Ariel hair, if you actually enjoy life. I could have a goddamn collection nowadays. But A has this wig-phobia. “But I love your natural hair,” he says. I tell him my natural hair will be just fine under this wig, in fact it's good sun protection. He refuses to comprehend what I'm saying. I swear he can't focus on anything unless it bleeds. “You should be proud of the body God gave you.” Boy, I haven't touched bacon for two years, so don't talk to me about the body God gave me. I didn't say. He wouldn't have reacted well to that. I say, but wigs are fun. He says but it would slip all over the place when we make love and he couldn't bury his hands in my hair. Because of course that's what it's all about with A. Veto, full stop. So I am not buying a wig but I can still shop. Thank God for incognito mode.




_Candace_ . Here was a glimpse of her, alive. Once she'd been a teen like Lisa who obsessed over a nineties R&B group and liked to play dress-up in the mirror and at school. Once she'd had an entire web-page devoted to her obsessions and her imagination. Now she'd...cut away parts of herself. Like that book that had terrified Robbie and Gabe in turn, _The Giving Tree_.

  * 2/10. I am very tired. I thought A was over these episodes after last time. He broke down the bathroom door. I don't know what to do. If I leave, I'm afraid he might really lose his mind and kill me. I am terrified I will break down one day and finally do it. And whatever happens will be my fault. I love A more than I can imagine ever loving anyone else and he has this spontaneity and confidence that makes me feel on top of the world when I'm with him. But he is a sick man. I just know the world is brighter to have A in it if we can only overcome this sickness.

  * 9/10. New dress caught A's eye and he just lit up when I put it on. Gave him a good show. He wanted me face-down again but my research and shopping trip paid off and didn't feel like I was getting stabbed in the guts the entire time. A once again very happy. Banner day. If every day could be like this.




The entries corroborated Iris' story. Every affront to Candace's dignity came with its explanation.

  * 8/10. Really proud of my menu plan this week. Wish Mom could see me now—Little Miss Homemaker. She never made anything like this when I was a kid. A is very picky about the weirdest things. It's got to be exotic, it's got to have presentation, and flavor definition but not too much flavor, and visual interest, or he won't eat it, he'll just dig the gallon tub of ice cream out of the basement freezer and then moan about the state of his abs, if he doesn't have a fit because he's disappointed. Have pretty much got that problem whipped—keep cycling recipes. As long as it fits in his latest health food craze, he'll at least try it. With the menus and all the ingredients listed ahead of time, I can get all the shopping done in one trip, and then not have to worry about food until after A finishes this string of day shifts. No repeats of Lemon Day. Humiliating.

  * 4/10. A spoils me so much. I don't know why I don't rate today higher, because nothing new has happened. Went to the garage and sat in my Audi with the radio on and the doors locked, like a space capsule. It's tricked out—nothing but the best for his cinnamon girl. He has no idea I hate that song. I knew the first time he asked me out that he was completely, hopelessly clueless and that's just something I have to tolerate. A still hasn't ordered a second garage remote. He forgot. Really there should be three remotes so he can take the Lotus or the Caddy without switching the button from car to car. I can't take the Audi out without punching a hole in the gate. Tempting some days. Cabin fever. Look at me, poor little rich girl.




Still cutting away parts of herself, the parts that could want, the parts that didn't fit this narrow life Alex constructed for her. But at last—early, early, months before these more recent posts:

  * I need to face the facts. I'm a battered wife—common law. I don't deserve this. A treats me like shit. There's nothing I can do or say that will fix him because he doesn't want to change, and there is no bottom to this pit. I am ashamed I let him treat me this way for so long. I just hope I can find the courage to tell my sister.




She'd surfaced, briefly. And then she'd drowned.

 

* * *

 

Robbie cruised around LAX hoping to pick up a pax before heading home for the morning to sleep. He'd just dropped off an uncoordinated and slurring sixty-something man, “Geoff,” who spent the entire trip to the airport nursing a tiny energy drink. As he rounded the airport for the third time, he got a ping and hit accept. “Rhonda,” 4.8 stars.

He pulled up to the pick-up area and spotted a tall, washboard-ripped Asian-American woman in a red snap-back and a tight crop-top. She spotted his car, jumped three feet in the air (those thighs), and looked down at her phone in disbelief. Much like Robbie was doing to his own phone.

Eli had no snappy comments. He'd been sullen the last few days.

“Uh,” Robbie said articulately, as he rolled down the passenger window by hand.

“Robbie Reyes!” Rhonda Rubens exclaimed. “Or should I say. 'Eliot?'”

“Yes. Yes, you should. I'm, uh, there's been some...paperwork?”

“Say no more, Mr. Reyes,” she said, one hand skating over the roof-line, never quite touching the skin of the car and raising the hairs on the back of Robbie's neck. “Aaaaah-uh-um. _May I_ get in?”

“Of course.”

She took a deep breath that raised up the cords in her neck, and shook out her shoulders. “Ooh-kay.” She gripped the door handle firmly, paused, and then swung open the door. Scanned the car top to bottom, sniffed it. Tossed her leopard-print hard-shell suitcase into the backseat, where it landed with a squeak of springs. It must have weighed forty pounds. She handled it like it was made of Styrofoam. Then she placed one foot in the footwell, and gingerly eased herself down.

Her thighs didn't feel soft or bony against the seat like other pax. Thick with muscle, they felt more...alive.

“Long flight?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah. Conference in Boston. Good to be back, gonna do a shoot at Muscle Beach. West Side, Best Side, yanno?” She shut the passenger door with a reverent clunk and—stroked—she stroked the—she—the glove box—

“How's your Mini?” Robbie asked quickly. “No more alignment issues? Tracking, wobble?”

“Oh, the Mini's gone,” Rhonda said casually.

“Gone?”

“Sold it. I drive a Mazda Miata right now—a step down, I know, but I needed something small enough I could deadlift the rear bumper. Got twenty-thousand new subscribers out of that video. Cars come and go. Right now I got my eye on a '71 'Cuda.”

“Okay,” said Robbie. He'd thought she'd loved that Mini. The world was very goddamn strange.

“Say, when are you gonna hit me up for some gym time? I don't give out those cards to just anybody.”

“No time.”

“ _Everybody_ has time for one of my workouts,” Rhonda said firmly. “I can make fifteen minutes feel like two hours. With _all_ the benefits.”

“Can't afford it,” Robbie admitted.

“Six months free. Special for you.”

“ _Why?_ ” Robbie demanded, narrowing his eyes.

Rhonda twisted in her seat to face him. “Lemme be candid with you?”

“Please.”

“Advertising.”

Robbie raised one eyebrow.

“Really. Consider yourself...virgin clay. Ninety-nine percent of my male customers come to me with some kind of gym bod already. They just need fine tuning, or a daily power-nap, something to take them from an eight to a ten. Now you—” she reached over, hovered over his bicep for a moment, and gave him a quick squeeze. “I'm willing to bet you never drank a protein shake in your life. Nothing but clean living and working with your hands, am I right?”

Robbie shrugged and kept his eyes on the road.

“You ever bust your knee? Sprain your elbow? Dislocate your shoulder?”

“Broke my hand once. It's fine now.”

“Yeah, but no major joints, right?”

He shrugged again.

“Great. See, you got nothing to hold you back. But the face,” she made her fingers and thumbs into a picture-frame and squinted through it. “That is a face made for virality. Those eyes pop. People _love_ heterochromia, and with your skin tone—umph. You got unique, tasteful body mods. Nice gauges, they balance your face perfect the way they are, and I love that silver V thing on your forehead. What is that?”

“Uh,” Robbie said. He shifted lanes and pressed the gas a little harder than strictly necessary.

“It's mysterious, is what that is. So. Six months free, you post a selfie once a week—I can help you, we want to capture your best angle—hashtag RhondaRubensLighteningFast. You get a body that turns heads as much as this car does, I get the credit for your transformation.”

Robbie did enough transforming already. “Thanks. But not interested.”

Rhonda narrowed her eyes and clenched her jaw, then turned away with a deliberate smile. “Suit yourself.” She stroked the glove-box again, the door, the roof-pillar.

“I'm sorry, that's really distracting,” Robbie said.

“Whoa,” Rhonda snapped. She ran one hand down her torso. “I work harder to maintain this body than you've ever worked for anything in your life—”

**Fightin' words.**

“—and if you can't reign in your trouser snake, that's your fault you can't appreciate _art_ when it's sitting in front of you.”

“No!” Robbie exclaimed, still distracted, and now also feeling embarrassed and misjudged. “No! It's the—dashboard. Fingerprints.”

She stared at him for as long as it took for them to pull out to the avenue. Then she raised one eyebrow, high and quick, like she practiced that in the mirror. She probably did. Probably had a whole facial workout regimen she did while she worked her abs. “You mighta picked the wrong side gig, Robbie Reyes.”

“Could be.”

“Can't really blame you. This is one...very sexy machine.” And she ran one callused hand over the door panel.

Robbie blasted the radio. An AM call-in station.

“How do you listen to this bullshit?” Rhonda yelled, after thirty seconds of talk radio at bone-shaking volume.

“Clears my head,” Robbie yelled back.

Rhonda kept her hands over her ears for the rest of the trip to her apartment in Pasadena. She left him a three star review.

 **I feel violated. She needs to pay. With her** _**life** _ **.**

Robbie felt frustrated and angry, too, but this was a stretch even for Eli.

“There is something seriously wrong with you.”

A pointed silence. Then,

**Shit or get off the pot.**

“What?”

**This Alex Northwick cunt. Either kill him. Which I maintain is a terrible idea. Or let me find someone else to kill.**

**You think you just need a little more evidence and then you'll be sure, but you're playing God. That's what you're doing. And you're not God. You'll never know if this guy deserved it or not, 'cause in the real world, there's no such thing as “deserve.” You're either gonna kill him, or you won't. And if you're not killing him, you're just wasting our time.**

“You're setting deadlines, now?”

 **No.** Hurriedly. **I have an itch. Like Northwick. Only he gets to shoot pigs all year. You're not even letting me kill pigs! It's unsustainable. My bloodlust will not be denied, I will take every last shred of sanity you have left! You must kill.** _**We** _ **must kill. You and me, we are one, COME ON, kid.**

“Do you want to hunt feral pigs?” Robbie asked wearily.

**No! Just watch the fucking morgue footage, if you need a kick in the pants!**

Robbie stared at the road ahead of him, driving by autopilot while his thoughts skidded on sand. If he watched that video, he would see Alex Northwick processing Candace Gutierrez' body. He would discard the last scrap of doubt that let him hover in inaction. At that point, he knew on some irrational instinct, Robbie would have no control. Point of no return. To watch that video would be to murder Alex Northwick.

 

* * *

 

At home, after seeing Gabe off to school, Robbie lay on top of his blankets with a sock over his eyes in his darkened bedroom. As he waited for the melatonin to kick in, he pondered.

Over the past month, these two people he had never met had become his obsession, in a way that nothing other than Gabe had ever been before. He felt irrationally tied to them. To Candace, who had been murdered, and to Alex, who had gotten away with it.

Alex Northwick saved lives for a living. He repaired wounds. He stopped up bleeding blood vessels. He gave hope to broken people. He did this, going by Candace's off-hand comments and his own trophies on Facebook, because the sight of blood and suffering energized and attracted him—but still. He saved lives.

He was neuroatypical in some vague way: he loved the sights and sounds of suffering in his patients, his game animals, and his lover of four years. He had a peculiar, strained relationship with his parents. He was bad at maintaining friendships and had few people to confide in. He was bad with money. Bad with planning longer than a few hours ahead. Possessed of a resilient, cynical optimism.

Alex had killed one woman, and it had taken him four long years. Now he was four years older. Little by little, he would age out of his targets' social circles. He might never meet another woman who would devote herself to him like Candace had. He might kill a few others, or he might continue to content himself with bears and feral hogs. On balance, how many lives would be saved or salvaged as Alex played his heedless games of blood and death?

Alex Northwick had been loved. Few people had ever been loved as well or as deeply as Alex Northwick had been loved, because Candace Gutierrez had given him everything she had, wholly and innocently, in a prolonged and painful sacrifice. She had uplifted the good he could have been, and she had comforted the monster. Surely, her love, even after her death, demanded respect.

Robbie was hunting a _doctor._

He remembered the bag from the cooler as Eli gripped it using his hands. The watery gleam of the blood that pooled in the plastic.

Candace had loved him, and loved him well. But love was a verb. A continual exertion. She could not love him now. She had loved him so well he had killed her for it, and not only killed her: he had taken her apart while she lived. Divided her from her family, from her ambitions, her curiosity, her passions, her own body. Through whining and bullying and robbery and rape, he had stripped her to the bones, alive. Candace may have loved him, but she had not wanted to be cut to pieces. She had tried to escape—in her diary, in her head, in the locked confines of her Audi, and in her mother's house. Candace was guilty of nothing. She had loved purely. She had deserved to live.

Robbie thought of the helicopters that pursued the Charger the night he'd died. When they cornered him, he'd knelt in the searchlight, arms up, surrendering. He'd been innocent of anything deserving death, he'd believed in their good intentions. He knew they would treat him harshly, but he'd believed they followed the law.

They had had no good intentions. Candace, likewise, had submitted to her death and captivity, being loving, and alive, and innocent, and able to hope for that fading glimmer of a tolerable future, that narrowing ledge where she could rest. Robbie might once have been innocent, but now he'd been dead, and his soul was bound up with Eli's. The evil in him refused to submit to the evil in others. He could wear the stains that Candace, devoted to love, would never have borne.

Candace was only one life, yes, and Alex's job was to save lives every day.

But Candace's life was enough.

 

* * *

 

Robbie picked a Sunday night to view the morgue footage. Monday and Tuesday, Canelo had no shifts for him. Gabe would be in school. Robbie would have over fifty hours for whatever he began tonight to run its course.

In his bedroom, he booted up the laptop. Hovered over the touchpad as his heart pounded. Double-clicked.

He rubbed his palms hard over the buzzed hair on the sides of his head as he waited for the footage to load. At last, the video player showed him a corner-bird's-eye view of a long tiled room dominated by four steel tables. The video started at midnight. The room was clean, empty. No bodies. No blood.

Robbie scrolled through to 3:02 AM, when Alex Northwick's badge had been used at the morgue's entrance. He waited.

All the security footage was shot at around two frames per second. So when a gurney appeared below the camera's eye, it jerked forward in a choppy, strobing motion. A tall, lean, pale-skinned man in scrubs and a surgical cap propelled it over the tiles, past two tables. He stopped, turned his head toward the door. Another jump, and the gurney was alongside the third table.

The sheet that covered the body splashed into the air, froze in a shape like a child falling. Then the sheet dropped out of view, and Robbie saw Candace on the gurney.

**Oh, fuck.**

Her head was turned to face the camera, her features unmistakable, eyes open, mouth slack. For weeks, Robbie had memorized her eyes, her jawline, the curve of her forehead in the photos that survived her. Her hair was matted on one side with dark liquid. A broad cut distorted her opposite eyebrow. But there was no bruise, no black eye. It took a beating heart to spill blood behind an eye.

**He coulda turned the lights out. Pulled out the wiring for the camera. Coulda sprayed some kinda foamy cleaner on the lens. But no. This stupid-smart arrogant fuck.**

Her legs and arms were contorted as if she'd been frozen in time while running, or being startled. When the man scooped her off the gurney and onto the table, shoved the gurney away with his foot, Candace's limbs stayed bent, hands curled toward her throat and legs crooked to the side.

**I mean, it's almost too perfect.**

**Robbie. This could be someone else. A setup. Body-double. It's easier than you'd think, especially when you're trying to interpret camera footage—difficult to judge the target's true height. And she's stiff, see. She coulda come right out of a freezer.**

With obvious effort, the man pried each of Candace's arms down to lie at her sides. Then he paced around the morgue while Candace stared sightlessly toward the camera. He returned with a pair of scissors. Cut her clothes off and threw them away, leaving her naked, bruised, on the shining steel.

Then he left. He left her exposed, staring at the camera as he was out of view. Robbie scrolled on, blocking her naked body with his left hand. He wished he could reach through the screen and cover her.

Twenty-three minutes later, the man returned with a pile of papers and a pen, which he spread out over a neighboring autopsy table. He sorted and scribbled and signed, his back to Candace, for another thirty minutes. It was 3:58 when the man finally turned back toward Candace. He put his bare hands in her blood-stained hair.

**Doctors wear gloves, Robbie.**

_He's also a hunter. Why is there so much blood on the opposite side of her head from that cut?_

**Two head wounds.**

_Must be deep, if it bled that much and it's so small we can't see it._

He lifted one arm, scratched the back of his cap with his bloody hand. As the sleeve of his smock rode up, the camera caught the edge of an armband tattoo, curved slashes that evoked animal claws high on his bicep.

**That could be Sharpie.**

_I don't think so._

Robbie scrolled back to the moment Alex's hand lifted Candace's bloody hair. Paused it.

_What do you think?_

**Oh, boy.**

**Small, deep wound to the side of the head to make sure she stays down. Trauma surgeon and hunter would know to destroy the brainstem. A low-energy, small-caliber bullet. Or a screwdriver, scrambled around.**

He hit play again. Watched Alex scratch his head, leaving blood on his cap and revealing his tattoo to the camera.

Alex disappeared deeper into the morgue again, and returned, faster, with an armload of stiff plastic bags and a knife in a sheath. He bent low over Candace's face and cupped the back of her head with one broad hand.

Then he began to saw through the base of her neck with the knife.

 _I'm done stalling,_ Robbie decided. He closed the laptop. He couldn't speak. _We're going to kill him._

**Fuck.**

…

**You're doing this my way. We are not getting caught.**

_Fine. Great. He has to pay._

**Kid, tell me. Of all the hookers and human traffickers and drug dealers and axe-murderers in this trash-fire of a city, why does it have to be him?**

_You told me, after I...after I killed Yegor Ivanov for you. We're one, now, and I'm going to kill again. Well. This is who it's gonna be. He has to pay._

**You said that.**

Robbie stared, unseeing, over his desk at his bedroom wall. Alex was not a normal man. But Robbie knew many, many people who were also not normal. Arguably, there was no such thing as normal. But there was such a thing as love. When you loved someone, you did not cage them. When you loved someone, you did not smother their pride and curiosity at every turn until you were the only thing they had left. When you loved someone, you did not choke them, or rape them, or club them in the face and strike a final, surgical blow to make sure they never got up again.

_He needs to pay._

**Fine. But** _**we** _ **won't pay. Understood? You won't get us caught.**

_Alex made that look pretty easy._

Eli did a spit-take in the back of Robbie's head. **Oh, no. This arrogant sonofabitch didn't even try. He assumed no one would look into him, and he was** _**right** _ **until you and your “what's in the cooler” act came along. And why wouldn't he? Everything always turns out alright for this clod. Why do you think all my aliases have gringo names?**

**You and me, we're gonna have to work for it.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings:  
> Diary entries from a victim of domestic violence and eventual murder, detailing physical and emotional abuse, including implied rape. Near the end of this chapter, Robbie views video footage of the murderer preparing to dismember her body. Victim is an OFC of color.  
> Robbie threatens Eli with suicide if Eli makes him unsafe for Gabe to be around.  
> Gun violence. Robbie gets shot by a security guard. Robbie threatens a security guard with a gun.


	3. I'm no hero, I'm just a really angry man.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nora's latest job goes south. Vengeance comes for the Ghost Rider. Robbie falls asleep at the wheel.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's bad shit in the first and last thirds of this chapter. See end note for warnings. 
> 
> In the middle, there is a badass fight scene. If you want some background, I have images and meta.  
> This is everything you never needed to know about Michael Badilino.  
> http://rokhal.tumblr.com/post/177470331902/fangirling-vengeance  
> And this is a commission by Michael P Calero (currently framed on my wall) that I requested...many months after writing this chapter.  
> http://rokhal.tumblr.com/post/183142295922/check-out-this-badass-commission-i-got-at

**Gimme the wheel.**

It was still just after midnight the Monday morning that Robbie had watched the morgue footage.

_What, we're doing this now?_

**Ohooo, no. No, kid. We've got** _**homework.** _ **You think a day is long enough to kill one of two certified trauma surgeons in a major hospital and get away with it? Hell,** _**two** _ **days? We could be putting this plan together for weeks.**

**Gimme the wheel. I need a pen.**

Robbie stepped back reluctantly, hovering just beneath the skin and never quite releasing his hold. It was therefore even more disturbing to feel Eli settle into his body, shaking out Robbie's shoulders and cracking his neck. “ **Good boy.** ” He stood, kicking the chair back with a scrape, and stomped across the room to Robbie's closet, yanking the bare bulb's pull-cord. He squinted irritably in the harsh light. Pulled out one of Robbie's old spiral-bound notebooks and ripped all Robbie's old English notes out of it. “ **Serial killing 101. Always keep a scrap-book. So when you finally die, you get credit for all your kills.** ”

Robbie was pointedly silent.

“ **Anyway. There's an enormous range of options to rub out a target, and which you choose depends on the constraints of the target-environment, and to a lesser extent on the goals the killing is meant to serve.**

“ **So that's on you, boy. What's your goal? You asked me for help. This is your hit.** ”

_It's not my—it's—he has to pay. He has to._

“ **Okay, this is a mission killing. This is retribution. Personal for Mr. What's In The Cooler. Is this just between the three of us, or are we sending a message?** ”

_No message. I'd rather...I'd honestly rather Iris didn't know._

“ **You'd better hope Iris never knows, because she'd put the finger on us in a heartbeat, Roberto Morrow. So, we're allowed to make it look like an accident. Perfect. The greatest professional killer is the one you never know passed through. Though I have had fun the other way. Chopping off cocks. Stuffing wads of cash down various orifices.**

“ **I never got caught, not really. I got fingered a time or two, but they** _**never** _ **had enough to hold me, not for murder. I was a goddamn professional. It only takes one screw-up and your whole life is over in this game; a lot of rubes out there, they think it's just a mask and a gun and rolling off in a screech of rubber, and that'll do you nine times out of ten, but it's that tenth hit that gets you. A man in my line of work has to be** _**perfect** _ **. And I was perfect. So it's best for both of us that you keep your word and cooperate with me.** ”

_I've seen your idea of subtle._

“ **No, you haven't. Subtle's tedious and difficult. And I will make you suffer that tedium. Suffer, as I have suffered.**

“ **So he's got to** _**pay.** _ **That means car bombs, rifles, sabotage, and poison are out—never did have much use for those anyway.** _**Pay** _ **means face-to-face. Taking your time. Privacy.** ” Eli set the pen to paper. “ **Let's put that down: an hour of privacy with Dr. Northwick. That's more than I figure you'll stomach, but I'm being generous. Next question: Where can we get an hour to play with our target?**

“ **I'm asking you, Robbie.** ”

Robbie retreated a little beneath his skin, almost enough for Eli to tighten his grip on the body. Eli twirled the pen, then doodled a jagged border around the page.

_The house. A, uh, a storage area, like a warehouse or a private garage. A construction zone._

“ **No to that last one. Too exposed.** ”

_The hills. The place we go to burn up, in the Sierra Nevadas._

“ **I used to shed a lotta blood out there. For good reason. But we've been spotted. They say** _**La Leyenda** _ **haunts those hills—badass, but inconvenient.** ”

_Candace mentioned this place in the National Forest—she called it “our mountain.”_

“ **Poetic. Implies some privacy—it's worth looking into, if** _**you** _ **want to do the looking.** ”

He wrote those locations down: Northwick house. Urban hold-out. Rural hold-out.

“ **The house would be the perfect place to manufacture an accident. Most fatal accidents happen at home, you know. But a bastard this rich, he'll have a security system. We'd have to case the house to figure out the security, and that's more risk of being spotted and connected to him.**

“ **Oh, no, no, what am I saying.**

“ **Bleed on a Get Well Soon card. And mail it to him. Wait a couple days, long enough for him to get the mail and before the garbage gets picked up on his street—** ”

_Candace said he never checks the mail. He's too scatterbrained._

“ **Then we Fed-Ex him a package.** ”

_Then what about the webcams?_

“ **Webcams.** ”

_Maybe if we killed the fuse-box—or disconnected the modem—but the footage probably automatically uploads into the Cloud, so we'd have to deactivate the interior cameras without being seen._

“ **Interior cameras. Who does this guy think he is, Fidel Castro?** ”

_Candace—_

“ **Fine. Forget the house. Now we have to transport the target to our hold-out instead of just waiting for him to show up.** ”

_Can we teleport him? Just grab him and pull him into the car?_

“ **I honestly have no idea. Could be fun. But worst case scenario, you drop him, you pull into the car, we're gone, and he's alert and alive. Or the transition could kill him. Who do you want to test it on first?** ”

_OK, so we grab him. He drives a lime-green early-2000's Lotus Elise, and a gunmetal gray Escalade with the truck bed. Or an Audi of some kind, there weren't any pictures of that._

“ **Never left the garage.** ”

_We go to the hospital parking garage, find the car, see if we can park nearby, and when he shows up we drag him into the Charger—_

“ **Cameras. And the garage'll be swarming with witnesses at shift-change.**

“ **Kid, you're skipping steps. This plan right here is all we can do right now: transport the target to a hold-out location where we can ensure our privacy for at least an hour. At least the getaway is not a problem for us. But our next step is information-gathering.**

“ **Where does he live? Where can we predict him to go, and when?** ”

_He's online a lot. There's probably an app we can use to track him._

“ **For once the future comes through for our profession.** ”

 

* * *

 

Eli, vigilant against attracting the attention of magic-users and exorcists, demanded that they measure the strength of their aura with an EMF meter. Robbie refused to drop fifty dollars on a light-up gadget from a fraudster on Amazon, and borrowed the real thing, a gauss meter from the auto shop. They determined that Robbie, just walking around as himself, emitted an electromagnetic field about the same strength as an active CRT screen. With Eli closer to the surface, the field increased by 30%. The Car in its resting state emitted about as much EMF as Eli did. When they ghosted up, they emitted a blast of invisible electromagnetic waves that topped the upper limit of the meter's sensitivity, and after they snuffed out, the Hell Charger's tire tracks left an electromagnetic residue detectable for days after. Whatever crime scene they created when they finally confronted Alex, Ghost Rider couldn't be there. LA County had been known to use psychics, and if a real psychic with the right connections smelled their aura, Robbie and Eli would have capes after them.

Their “scrap-book” filled with notes. Plans and flow-charts. The weights, dimensions, and safety data for Alex's Cadillac Escalade and Lotus Elise. Hand-drawn maps of East Los Angeles Medical Center and its parking garage, hand-drawn maps of Angeles National Forest and its logging trails visible from Google Earth. Places they could steal Naloxone, in case they wanted to subdue Alex with heroin. The price of a bottle of regular insulin, if they wanted to subdue Alex with insulin.

 _How much would we even use?_ Robbie wondered about Eli's insulin idea.

**I don't know. Enough to keep him quiet. Say half a bottle. Then when we're ready to play with him, I've got basic medic training, I'll show you how to stick an IV. Dump Red Bull into his veins. Sugar'll wake him up.**

_That won't kill him?_

**Probably not. Who cares? We can't use Coca-Cola, the carbonation'd give him the bends—or why not, that could be fun.**

They tested the limits of Ghost Rider's teleportation. From the car, he could jump twenty miles away or more, so long as the end-point was marked with a dot of Robbie's blood. But he couldn't carry anything through the shadows with him except the chains he manifested.

Alex Northwick's house was public record. He had a custom home in a new, relatively sparse development off La Tuna Canyon Road, perched on the side of a hill at the end of a short spur street, with a high concrete privacy wall and a heavy steel gate. It was at least an hour commute to East Los Angeles Medical Center by any of the several routes Alex could take. La Tuna Canyon Road ran along the edge of a state park and was private and winding, with poor visibility around each curve, but Alex could jag West and wrap South around the empty hills via I-5, and from there a multiplicity of other routes to the hospital, depending on where traffic was best that day. Plus, he might make stops along the way, he might head out early so as to get to work on time every morning, or cut it close and occasionally wind up late, and his schedule might rotate. They needed to establish his pattern. Robbie found an app developed by a short-sighted Cal-Tec student that tracked and logged friends' location data every time they logged in to Facebook. It drained Robbie's battery worse than the Uber app did. He had to run this app and the Facebook app continuously for at least two weeks to get a bead on Alex's habits.

During those two weeks, Robbie could only wait and speculate.

He still cooked for Gabe, mustered up smiles and hugs so his little brother knew he hadn't been replaced, even though he felt so cold and dirty, unfit to touch him or speak to him. He still worked at the shop, headphones bouncing with the mix of jazz and narcocorrido music that Eli insisted on so he could think. He still slept all day when Canelo didn't have a shift for him, and hauled sketchy drunk pax around the city all night.

Nora texted him one of those nights, announcing she was giving him a $10 raise, boosting his wait fee to $30 per hour—more than half of his previous $40 fee before she'd docked him for skipping out on her. She'd made her point. Robbie couldn't afford to lose her business, and she really didn't want to go looking for another driver. No more listening to the police bands while he waited for Nora.

He met her on a corner near one of the four apartments that might be hers—she didn't trust him, but it was hard to take that personally. She had two friends with her; in their knee-high stiletto boots and vinyl miniskirts, Nora in red and the other two in yellow and black, they looked like an edgy girl-band. He turned on his Uber app. Ping and accept, now he had the meter running, and some sort of evidence that he wasn't involved in Nora's business.

He got out, folded down the passenger seat. “I have water. Phone chargers.”

“Thanks.”

They settled in. The trip was to a house in Yorba Linda, a short drive into an upscale neighborhood of tortuous streets and lush, close-cropped lawns interrupted by elaborate rock-gardens. There were eleven cars parked outside one of the houses, where prog-rock rattled and whined through the imitation-stone walls.

Robbie parked across the street and stared at the place, unsettled. This was a house party. This was a lot of drunk people in one place.

Nora caught his look and shrugged. “We're booked for two hours,” she said. “You'll be here.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“You'll have your phone on.”

Robbie nodded, pointed at the charger in the cigarette lighter.

“If we're more than fifteen minutes late coming out, call the cops.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. Plan B.” She got out and helped Robbie fold down the front seat, helped the other women out after her. They hugged for a moment, all three of them. “Alright,” Nora said, breaking away. “Let's go make some money.”

They turned away from the Charger and Nora began to strut, they all did, snapping their high heels down on the tarmac, hips swinging, shoulders back, hair floating in the light evening breeze. Up the driveway, up to the front door. Like they were headed off to war, Robbie thought. They knocked on the door for about a solid minute, gave up, and walked right in. Moments later, a rowdy cheer rose from the house.

If he was a girl, he wondered if he'd be right there with them, to keep Gabe safe.

**Abso-fuckin-lutely.**

He needed to get an ASE certification somehow. Increase his earning potential. Save enough money to go to automotive school for a bit; he knew the job, but to work at the big shops, he needed fancy letters on a piece of paper.

He got back in the car and reviewed trigonometry. When he got frustrated, he checked his tracking app, where a map of Los Angeles sprouted ever thicker clusters of dots from Alex Northwick's location data. As his phone started to run low for the second time that day, he plugged it into the car and endured the mild headache as it sipped at his battery.

He was so tired.

He set his alarm for Nora's two hour deadline, laid the seat back as far as it would go, and took a nap.

He woke to a shrill jangle of bells, feeling worse than when he'd gone to sleep. Goddamn battery-hogging phones. At least the thing was charged. He sat up stiffly and watched the house, where over-taxed speakers currently roared, “Screaming like demons, swinging from the ceiling!”

Nora should be coming out any time now. He leaned against the window, phone in his hand, and lost ten minutes.

He thought he heard glass breaking. Probably some drunk taking a run at a sliding door.

-r u ok, he texted Nora.

He stared at the phone waiting for an answer. Another few minutes passed by, and then it was time to call the cops.

**Fuck'em. They'll just complicate things. Go in there and start busting skulls. Hey, you can leave the hookers alive. No one ever takes them seriously, they don't even count as witnesses.**

Robbie ignored him.

“911, what is your emergency?”

“Hi, I dropped my friends off at this party—” He gave the address. **You're not their friend, you're their Uber driver. Keep your story straight.** “And they called me to pick them up, but they're not coming out. It's super rowdy, and I'm a little scared to go in. They're girls. And there's a lot of big, drunk guys around, and I don't know what's going on.”

“We can send an officer to check things out. Stay where you are.” A pause. “There's a patrol car in the area, they can get there in twenty minutes.”

**That's ten minutes to bust up this party and get out. No problem.**

_Yeah, I'm starting to agree with you._ “Thanks. I'm gonna hang up now.”

“Sir, please stay on the line until the patrol car arrives—”

Robbie hung up.

He stowed his phone in the glove box, got out, and put his review book in the trunk. Ran Ghost Rider's chain through his hands, set it aside, and grabbed their favorite body hammer, the one with the spike on one side. Tucked it through his belt, under his coat. It banged against his hip as he stalked to the door. He felt Eli rising under his skin. It was tempting to let him take over. With the way his blood was pounding, he might slip and Eli might end up driving whether Robbie wanted him to or not.

**You want me on this.**

_Not really._

**I promise not to hurt the hookers.**

_I'm sure you promised Dad not to hurt Mom, too._

Eli couldn't come up with an answer to that.

Robbie stood at the door, counting his breaths, for as long as he dared. The door was unlocked. He went in.

Outside, the music was obnoxious. Inside, it was a wall of sound that made Robbie wish he could close up his human ears behind his faceplates. The base shivered through his lungs, the midrange buzzed through his leather coat. Every light was on, and he had to pause a moment for his eyes to adjust.

The foyer opened onto a carpeted living room. Both were empty, aside from scattered red plastic cups, men's shoes everywhere, empty bottles of Fireball and colorful IPAs, and, oddly, about fifty golf clubs all over the floor.

Toward the back of the house, he saw a tall, pudgy white man lying half-in, half-out of a shattered sliding door leading toward a backyard pool. There were two men in the pool, fully clothed, Frenching. They didn't notice Robbie. The kitchen was also empty, the freezer door ajar, the sink full of beer bottles, the counter crowded with bottles of liquor and squeezed-dry limes.

It was hard to hear anything beneath the music. Robbie found an entire garage-band's worth of speakers stacked in the dining room, and pulled the plugs. Over the ringing in his ears, he heard cheers and drunken laughter coming from the basement.

He stepped in vomit while he circled the ground floor. Finally found the stairs. A skinny guy with a colorful glass bong sprawled on the lower landing, and Robbie kicked him in the shins as he stepped over him. “Hey, the music's stopped,” the stoner complained as Robbie stalked down. “You gonna get Graig to check it out?”

Robbie ignored him. He was grinding his teeth so hard he could feel them moving in his jaw.

The party had moved to the basement. It was a finished basement, bland white walls and gray imitation-stone tile, with a wet bar, a television as wide as Robbie was tall, a dartboard surrounded by pocks in the drywall, and a pool table. Windows looking out onto bricks stacked under the dirt. Lighting from randomly-placed canister lights. A huge wall mirror, like in a dance studio, gave a second view of the crowd of young men who filled the room, stumbling and leaning against the wall and leaning against each-other, watching, shoving, drinking. Clustered around the pool table, from which came a rhythmic, fleshy noise.

“Come _on,_ bitch, make some music!” a man slurred.

Robbie felt his heart stop. He coughed. Spat a gob of burning oil. He stalked into the crowd of drunks, elbowing ribs, yanking on collars, until he forged a path to the pool table. He had to stop for a moment and blink before he understood what he was seeing.

**Oh, I'm starting to like your choice in friends, kid.**

Nora and one other woman, the shorter one, had been stripped and tied to the pool table with cut lengths of climbing rope, face down on the felt, feet on the floor. A young man was hunched over Nora, fully clothed except for his bare ass. Another man on the other side of the room was in the process of unzipping his fly.

**We're both going to enjoy the hell out of this.**

“Shut up, I'm getting them out.” Robbie's voice was hoarse. “And the cops are coming. Remember?”

At the mention of cops, the man on Nora looked up and tipped slowly to the floor with a wet sound, and the man across the table froze in the act of getting his dick out. Nora looked up through tangled hair. Her make-up was all over her face, except for her eyeliner, which as sharp as when she'd stood waiting at the curb. “Eliot, what the fuck are you doing here.”

“Two hours.”

A man in a button-down shirt and pink shorts grabbed Robbie by the shoulder. “Take a hike, José. How'd you get in here?”

Robbie held off Eli and the transformation with an effort that cracked a tooth. “Two hours. I called the cops. Give them back their stuff.” He swallowed back fire, feeling the raw burn in his human throat. “Party's over.”

“Shit, they're yours?” Pink Shorts snorted. “I thought pimps were supposed to be, like, scary.”

Robbie twisted out from under his arm before he lost himself entirely. He dug his multitool out from his pocket and cut Nora free, looking over his shoulder the whole time. The fold-out blade was razor sharp. Robbie kept all his tools in good condition. Nora stood, rubbed her wrists, shook out her arms with a stony look. Then she crossed the room, naked, to disappear down another door. Robbie cut the other woman free. She crawled under the table.

He waved the knife under the nose of the man whose approach he'd interrupted. “Give her your shirt.”

“Jesus! Okay, okay. No harm done.”

Robbie snarled.

The man lurched backward. “Holy fuck what's wrong with your eyes?”

“Shirt.”

The man removed his shirt and Robbie passed it under the pool table. Robbie stood guard, back to the table as the drunks milled around him, alternating nervous and aggressive glances.

Nora returned, barefoot in her miniskirt and tube top, with the third woman and a bundle of boots, clothes, and purses. She bent under the table. “Star, time to go. Star? Honey?”

Silence.

“Estrella.”

Estrella crept out, shaking. She had the shirt tucked against her chest, but she hadn't put it on.

Nora dropped the bundle of clothes and helped Estrella into the skirt and blouse she'd arrived in, moving her arms and legs for her like a child. Estrella was too thin, and bruised. With her makeup smeared and her hair disheveled, shoulders hunched, she looked somehow years younger and years older than the woman who had strutted into this house. “We're good, Star,” Nora said, shoving a purse into her arms. “We came in with a plan and the plan worked. We even got paid. Okay? We got our money, everybody's alive, we're even getting outta here before the cops come. Hey. Look at me. You're gonna move back to Reno. Right? Your mom in Reno?”

Her third partner, the one who'd been in the other room, had blood in her hair, and she leaned on the table for support, her eyes unfocused.

Robbie circled the pool table back to Nora and the other women. He picked up a scrap of rope from the green felt. “Whose idea?”

“Not your business. Let it go.” Nora shoved her partners toward the stairs, but as she looked back, her hard eyes lingered on Pink Shorts. Pink Shorts made a V of his fingers and licked between them.

Robbie swallowed down the fires, trembled. Struggled to move his legs, keep Eli from sweeping his control away, keep from burning down this whole rotten house around these rotten people.

He stalked toward Pink Shorts, and the drunks spread out around them, oohing and humming at the scent of a fight. Pink Shorts squared his feet, sized Robbie up. He was a bit less drunk than the others. The leader. Perhaps this was his parents' house. “So I let the guys sneak a few freebies and dent one of your hos,” he said. “What do I owe you?”

“People don't own people,” Robbie spat.

**Philosophy. I like it! Kill him, kill'em all! The same breed of rats as Alex Northwick, only there's an accident here ready-made: electrical fire from those speakers! Burn the house down!**

“You're not their pimp, you're their little brother, aren't you?” Pink Shorts sneered, shoving Robbie in the shoulder. “Take a swing. Go on. My mom'll shove you so deep in Rikers you'll never see dry land again.”

 _He'll pay,_ Robbie promised—to Eli, to Nora, to his own rage. _Later._ He backed up, flicked open his knife again. A collective “whoooooah” circled the room.

“Are you kidding me with that thing? 'Assault with a deadly weapon'?”

With a hard, swift motion, Robbie laid open the pad of his thumb. It was way too deep. He hit bone, cut the nail as the blade went over the tip. It stung, then seconds later it throbbed, and it was almost enough to bring up Ghost Rider to waste everyone in the house and get spotted by the cops. He put the knife away. Pink Shorts was still as he approached, suddenly pale. “Okay. You're fuckin' crazy.”

Robbie grabbed the man by the belt with his bleeding hand, thumb to the leather. Pink Shorts punched him, and he rocked with the hit, Eli making a grab for his body as Robbie fought through the pain to hold on.

“I'm coming for you,” Robbie growled, stumbling away and bleeding on the tile. “When the cops come, tell them what you did. Safest place for you is in a prison cell.” He spun on his heel and stalked up the stairs and out to the car, the unused hammer banging against his thigh the whole way.

 **Gonna come back for him?** Hopeful.

 _We always need people to beat on._

**Or kill.**

_I'll think about it._

He stowed the hammer in the trunk while Nora watched, one eyebrow raised. He let her and her partners into the car. Started the engine and drove. They saw a squad car cruise by in the opposite lane, headed for the house. Robbie pulled into the parking lot of a McDonalds. He cleared his throat and tasted blood. His breath was still hot, and he hurt—his thumb, his throat, the back of his eyes, his tongue, the tooth he'd broken by clenching his jaw too hard. “Where to now?”

“Don't ever do that again,” Nora said from the front seat.

Robbie had to shut his eyes against the sparks. He got one of his waters out from under the seat, bleeding all over it, and swallowed painfully. “Some gratitude'd be nice.”

“I don't pay you enough to do that shit and I don't plan to start,” Nora growled. “You're the driver. You work for me. I say stay in the car, you stay in the car. Don't go waltzing in like some big hero and expect part of the cut.”

The sparks died abruptly, leaving a nauseated feeling in his gut—horror, or engine oil. “What?” Robbie rasped. “No! No! I was just. The dispatcher said the police wouldn't be there for twenty minutes.”

Nora gave him another of her long, assessing stares. Then she looked at the ceiling and laughed. “Twenty minutes. You think twenty minutes—kah-ha-ha!”

“I'm glad he came,” Estrella said, from where she and the other woman curled in the back.

“It was a nice gesture,” Nora compromised. “But you could've sent everything to shit. Don't do it again.” She dug through her purse, pulled out a mini pack of moist towelettes. Wiped her face on one, under her skirt with the other. Threw the pack into the back for the others. “I feel like a milkshake. Anyone else want a milkshake?”

Silence from the back.

“Take us through the drive-through and we'll get some milkshakes. Then drop us off where you picked us up.”

“Yes, ma'am,” Robbie croaked.

They got milkshakes. Even Robbie got a milkshake at Nora's insistence; it soothed his throat but he was afraid he'd throw it back up. Nora kept talking, trying to coax replies out of her partners. Estrella let her milkshake melt between her legs, and the other woman held it like an icepack against the side of her head all the way back to Hillrock Heights. They were not okay. But to hear Nora talk, they'd do this again anyway. They needed the money.

That was why Robbie was here, too.

After he dropped them off, as soon as they passed out of sight in the rearview mirror, he let the rage burn his body away and he and Eli roared screaming and spitting into the night. They couldn't hunt down Pink Shorts, not so soon after the cops had been there. Tearing up the desert was their only release.

It wasn't enough. It was never enough.

(Robbie feared what it would mean, if killing Alex Northwick proved to be enough.)

 

* * *

 

Some time around three in the morning, they ported back to Hillrock Heights, snuffed out, and Robbie drank the last of his waters and bought Fritos and Gatorade at a gas station. He managed to stomach two Fritos before the nausea hit. He sipped his Gatorade, hunched over and leaning out the door of the Charger. He didn’t dare sleep. If he didn’t get more calories into himself, Eli would be the one waking up, and Eli knew it—he could feel his eagerness pressing at him.

He turned Uber back on, opened the windows, and started driving toward LAX. The trip over would give him plenty of time to cool down, nurse his Fritos, and hopefully get his human body running again so he could take a nap before seeing Gabe off to school. And it wasn’t like he had to pay for gas.

The last thing he needed, after slipping into a hypoglycemic coma, was to invite rowdy drunks into his personal space right now. Red-eye passengers, though. Silent, grouchy, unquestioning, and generally singles.

He got a ping on his second circle around the airport. “Michael”, 4.5 stars. Going to a Super-8 in East LA. He accepted the ping and drove off.

Night at LAX was all brilliant overhead lamps and harsh shadows, sullen crowds visible half a mile away as they hustled along behind the glass of the terminals. Robbie rolled all the windows down, letting off residual heat. There wasn’t a line to get to the pick-up point at this time of night, so he pulled right up to the curb. A man waiting nearby practically did a spit-take as Robbie pulled up: he was huge, each arm the size of one of Robbie’s thighs, wearing a rumpled dark suit and carrying a duffel bag that could fit his own twin inside over one shoulder. He had the belligerent hunch and darting wary eyes of a cop. Robbie hoped this wasn’t “Michael.”

“Eliot?” the cop demanded, leaning into the window with an incredulous expression.

Robbie let himself close his eyes for a moment. “Yes, sir. You Michael?”

“Yeah.”

Robbie got out and opened the trunk. Instead of dropping his bag on top of Ghost Rider’s chain, Michael picked up a length and fingered the shining links in one massive paw. “What’s this?”

“Tow chain,” Robbie said. _Nosy asshole._

“Mm.” Michael dropped the bag in, and the impact rocked the Charger on its shocks. At least 100 pounds of gear in that. He shut the trunk hard, straightened, and looked down his nose at Robbie. He was intimidating as hell. Solid muscle, and not the decorative kind. Professionally neat dark hair. Cold brown eyes. Hard mouth. Solid jaw. Judgment in every line of his posture.

Robbie opened the door for him and he got in. Frowned. “Does the seat go back farther?”

“No, sir. Sorry.” He swung himself into the driver’s seat. “You’re going to the Super-8?”

The man turned and stared at him for a long moment. In the close confines of the car, he had a weird smell. It made all the hairs stand up on the back of Robbie’s neck, or maybe that was the fact that he was so obviously a cop, and Robbie was fast realizing that he had a phobia.

**Want me to take over?**

_Fuck off._

The man ran one finger over the dashboard, sniffed it, and licked it.

Robbie stared.

“Habit,” Michael said, bone-dry. He made aggressive eye contact. Robbie met it with as indifferent a stare as he could manage, years of dealing with cheap customers, street-corner scammers, and Guero, rising up to smooth his face.

He put the car in gear and started off with a smooth but powerful lunge away from the curb. His pax was silent as they pulled onto the freeway, dodging semi-trucks and night-shifters—just tooling around on his phone. Despite the open windows, the man's unusual body odor still unsettled Robbie. He smelled exactly like what Robbie expected a cop to smell like in close quarters—sharp sweat, coffee, fading aftershave, cigarettes, and gun oil—but there was something else, something rotten and metallic and meaty, like the mummified cat he'd pried out of a Silverado's fanbelt once. The smell and his attitude combined gave Robbie that cold, helicopters feeling. Phantom aches in his jaw and his hip. Dread. Betrayal.

“How long have you driven for Uber?” the pax asked abruptly.

“A bit,” Robbie said.

“You got another job?”

“Mechanic.”

“Family?”

Jesus. He wished he'd canceled. Fucking cops. Robbie could have him out of the car and under his wheels in half a second if he wanted, and the man still gave him the shakes. Maybe he didn't know how to have a normal conversation—too much interrogation and now it's a habit, like tasting strangers' dashboards. “A brother. You? What brings you to LA?”

“Business,” the man said.

“You sound like you're from New York.”

“Mm.” The pax went silent again and fiddled with his phone, the bluish glow lighting his hard face from below.

They got on the interchange to 605 North. Briefly, the overpass carried them high over the brilliant city stretching out in all directions.

“Say,” Michael said, looking up from his phone. “Before I check in, there's a place I'd like to see. You good to change up the destination?” He reached into an inner pocket of his jacket and pulled out a crisp twenty.

Robbie shut his eyes so he could roll them in privacy. Driving pax was his _job._ He didn't need a goddamn _bribe_ to change his route.

_He better give us that twenty._

“Where to.”

“Turnbull Canyon.”

Robbie's fingers clenched the wheel involuntarily, he and Eli both jolting alert. _**What. The. Fuck.** _

That was one of Eli's old body dump sites.

**He wants to kill you.**

_He's from New York._

_**He's a supervillain.** _

The Charger rumbled North up the 605, the vents of the blower fluttering open and closed as they digested this. Robbie's uneasiness disappeared under a wave of aggression, and for an instant he wasn't sure who had control of their body, and as the heat rose in his lungs, he couldn't bring himself to care. They grinned.

“ _**Anywhere you want, sir.** _”

Turnbull Canyon was just a short jag through Whittier after they got off the 605, cruising between densely-packed houses and schools. Abruptly, Michael asked them to stop, and they gripped the wheel with both hands, rigid with the effort of banking down their rage, every sense singing in anticipation. Michael just jogged down the street, touched an Indian motorcycle parked in a driveway, and jogged back. He sat back in the car and stared his flat stare until they drove off again. They turned on to Turnbull Canyon Road, a darker, winding two-lane running in the shadow of low, steep, tree-spotted hills.

Robbie gazed off beyond the curves of the road into the hills and scrub trees, flat black and white in the glare of his headlights. His gloves creaked against the wheel as he hugged the hairpins.

“Your brother,” said the pax, also unreasonably tense. “Older or younger?”

Robbie flexed his tongue in his mouth to make sure it was still there. “Younger,” he rasped.

The pax's mouth twitched, like he had a bad taste. The rot smell intensified, as if the pax was actively stirring it up somehow, like pheromones. The pax, Michael or whatever his supervillain name was, tensed up and stared at Robbie like Robbie had wrecked his car and stolen his girlfriend, like he wanted to skin him. “I'm sorry to hear that,” Michael growled. Heat filled the Charger, and for once it wasn't from Robbie. The rot smell filled the cabin, bringing with it burnt flesh, blood. “He'll be better off.”

Robbie was already changing, but when the spiked fist slammed into his head, it met bone and brain, not steel and fire, and that was lights out for Robbie Reyes. Eli grabbed the wheel, for the car and the body, whipped the car into the ravine while burning the body up the rest of the way, and headbutted the pax so hard Ghost Rider's faceplates would have crushed a human skull.

There was a skull in the passenger seat, alright.

It didn't look human.

It looked about as much like a Ghost Rider as Robbie and Eli did, the way a rhinoceros bore a vague resemblance to a unicorn. If Eli was the unicorn, this was the rhinoceros. Dark oily fire. Spikes. Bulk. Leather. Muscle. Each forearm wrapped in chains, whose bloody links, as Eli could tell with confidence, had been carved from the bones of human children. Dull red coals for eyes, and sharp fucking tusks.

Eli's faceplates had broken one of this asshole's tusks. As the car crushed trees and roared down the ravine like an angry meteor, the tusk fell out of the Satanic Walrus's skull to be replaced by a new one.

A massive hand closed around Eli's throat, crushing the leather against the kid's vertebrae. Another hand gripped him by the head, right over the front vent. Eli's fire spewed furiously out his eyes and teeth. “Fuck, you're weird-looking,” the asshole rumbled, sounding downright jolly all of a sudden.

“ **Back atcha,** ” Eli snarled. He melted into the car before Asshole could rip his head off. He hauled himself up out of the roof and clung to it like a jockey, turning the Charger and sending rocks and dry grass spraying under the fiery wheels. Reached into the trunk and pulled out the chain. Didn't feel like knives right now. From the ends swung a pair of the kid's pointy hammers.

Asshole started punching from the inside of the car as they mounted back up across the road and immediately started climbing the hills. Eli wondered if this was what it was like to eat live octopus. Except an octopus couldn't tear your throat out while you swallowed, which is what it felt like when the roided-up oil-fire Ghost Rider ripped straight up through the roof and impaled Eli on one of the foot-long steel spikes that grew out of every damn limb.

It _hurt._ Eli punched him in the face and Asshole barely moved, except to wrap him in a bear hug and bite him through the heart with a maw like a saber-tooth tiger.

Eli stopped the car so suddenly they both flew from the destroyed cabin and rolled uphill, setting off grassfires as they grappled. Eli couldn't get his arms free to use the hammers. He kneed Asshole repeatedly in the groin, hitting nothing but leather and bone. The Charger roared below them, and he gunned it, tires skidding wildly on the poor surface of the hills, until it hit them at fifty miles per hour—not bad for a hundred yards uphill from a full stop. Asshole went flying. The car passed right through Eli.

He swung the chain, trying to spike Asshole in the head with a hammer, but he missed. He didn't know how to make the chains do the whirly thing. He needed the kid. They weren't fighting at full capacity. His skin was full of holes and his faceplates felt bent; this guy was strong, and fast, and not too fucking dumb.

Asshole shook some of his bloody chain off one forearm and lashed the sky; the links spooled out, infinite. Then he snapped forward and Eli ducked. For a moment he forgot he was an unnatural eldritch ghost-machine. He tucked and rolled down the hill and took cover behind a tree, patting the small of his back for a pistol Ghost Rider's jumpsuit didn't contain.

The bloody chain whirled around him like a python, crushing him to the tree trunk. Then Asshole heaved, and Eli and the tree ripped loose and flew through the air.

He tried to port back to the car, but the chain wouldn't let him. Or the tree—the car was on the earth and Eli was flying through the air and he couldn't connect the two. He struggled and raged and bit at the chains, but the rage was just his own ghost rage, it wasn't the kid's, he could only fuel Ghost Rider so far. **Wake up.** The tree hit the ground and Eli tried again to port to the car. Nada. Stretched his mind back to the Charger, revved the engine and sprayed gravel from under the back wheels as he rammed the asshole with three and a half tons of chrome and steel. Caught a spiked fist under the front bumper, flew through the air. Landed on his fucking roof.

**Fuck.**

His wheels screamed, shooting flame. Fire spewed up from the blower, tracing the curves of the hood as it poured into the sky. Pinned to the tree, Eli started to wriggle loose one joint at a time. **Wake up. Kid. C'mon.**

He heard an animal growling somewhere below the hill. No, an engine. Not a real engine. Something else.

The Satanic Walrus swaggered toward him, giving the chain a snap that tightened it right back up where it nestled between the kid's bones. Eli gave him a good long snarl. How dare he. He had worked so hard. He'd schemed. He'd worried. He'd _invested._ And here comes this guy. This New York psychopath, hops into Eli's cab _by accident,_ and, oh. Asshole was breaking off one of the giant spikes that sprouted from his chest and shoulders and head and knuckles and _fucking everywhere_ , and he was bringing it to bear in front of Eli's eye.

Eli didn't know how. But somehow, he couldn't deny, it had to be possible to destroy what he'd become. What he'd made the kid into.

He didn't know where he would go if Asshole tore the kid limb from limb. Maybe into the car. The way things were going, the car was heading to a damn wrecking yard.

**Robbie. Kid! Wake up. He didn't hit you that hard. Come on. Up! He's gonna spike us in the eyesocket. Up!**

Asshole stabbed the spike through their eyesocket and out one of their rear vents. Eli howled.

Asshole smacked the spike with a leathery palm and drove it into the tree behind Eli's head. Then he thrust his talons between the bone chains and yanked and pulled and scraped and got both Eli's forearms in one gorilla fist. **Kid. Kid!** He snapped another spike off his shoulders. Flipped it end over end in his free hand, drove it deep into the tree trunk, right through Eli's wrists.

This was bad. The spikes hurt, like, well, like being impaled. Worse than anything had the right to hurt a dead man. Eli wriggled like a sorority girl nailed to a railroad tie. Which was exactly what he'd experience all over again, and a couple hundred other unpleasantries besides, if he couldn't get away from this Ghost Rider.

Asshole surveyed his handiwork, hands on his hips, then knelt on Eli's chest, driving all his weight into him through his knee. He gripped Eli by the jaw, indifferent to the fire and oil that blazed out. Leaned in, and stared into Eli's remaining eyesocket.

 **No. No.** Not the stare. Not the penance stare. He couldn't take it again. **Kid, wake up! Goddamn it, Roberto!** Eli flicked shut his front vent and forced a gout of fire out the back vents, charring the wood behind him. As his head sank back into the ashes, Asshole tightened the chains and pounded the spike in again.

“You have the right to remain silent,” the Walrus rumbled smugly. “Anything you say can and will be used against you in the court of Vengeance. You have the right to cry for Mamma. If you do not have a Mamma—”

“ **I'ma shove those spikes where your cock used to be and use your skull as an ashtray!** ” Eli snarled.

“Yeah, you're a real badass,” the other rider rumbled. “State your name and occupation.”

“ **Belial. Prince of the Sixth Circle.** ” **Wake up, please wake up.**

“Mm.” Asshole gave Eli's head a little shake, rattling his skull against the spike pinning him to the tree. The strange rumble-growl from the road below them drew closer, creeping up the hill. Eli couldn't turn his head to look, and it was coming from side-on to the car where his lights and mirrors couldn't see well. “So, tell me, Belial. What's a demon like you doin' running hits for the Black Hand?”

 **The fuck.** “ **What?** ”

“Yegor Ivanov and half the Russians from Santa Monica to San Bernadino. And don't give me that 'innocent blood' bullshit. Who pulls your strings?”

Eli laughed hysterically. “ **You're here investigating? You think a** _ **suka**_ **like Yegor Ivanov needs a reason to turn up dead? I did you pigs a fucking favor!** ”

“Yeah, yeah, you're all righteous and shit.”

“ **I'm a vigilante superhero.** ”

“Pull the other one.”

Eli gaped his jaw and blasted fire at the other rider. It barely reached the walrus's chin. The walrus opened his own maw and poured out a wall of dull red flames and choking black smoke that fouled and deadened the air. Eli was weak. His own fires were starting to ebb—the Rider ran on rage, preferably Robbie's rage, and his own was steadily fading into desperation. The rumbling sound rolled nearer and nearer, and out of the corner of the Charger's side mirror he saw more of that dense black smoke, and a deep dim red haze that glooped and bubbled like gel. Gleaming back-swept horns and a long, low torso. A motorcycle, sort of, whose wheels looked a bit like fire and a lot like blood.

Eli felt Robbie stir in the back of his mind. **Kid. Kid. Get it together.**

“How about the undercover narcotics cops you beat most of the way dead back in May. Broke every single bone like some Puritan execution shit. FBI’s had three major investigations blown to hell thanks to you.” He kicked out, snapping the kid’s pelvis. “I’d bring you in if they had a cell that'd hold you. But this way’s gonna be way more fun.” He whistled, clawed fingers between lipless teeth, and the sort-of-a-motorcycle vroomed forward and drove right into the tree trunk, crushing more of Robbie’s bones under its sickly red wheels.

Robbie woke up. He woke up in full what’s-in-the-cooler mode, shocking their body with imagined cold and phantom bullet wounds. _AAAAAGH! Dios! What is that, get it off, get it off me!_ They bucked and wriggled under the chain as he infected Eli with his panic. The bike backed off so it could ram them again. _Holy fuck, holy fuck, what is that! Oh, god! What the fuck?_

Suddenly with the kid awake, the Walrus’s bike became a visceral, ultimate horror. Eli struggled to keep calm. **Okay, this looks bad. This is really bad. We’re impaled on this tree, okay? And this chain won’t let me teleport.**

_Get it off, get it off!_

**So what I need from you is enough juice to vaporize this tree, fast enough that your pax, that’s the other ghost rider over by the car, can’t tighten the chains again before we slip out. And somehow we gotta keep the chains from hanging up on the spike in your head.**

_This is bones. This is made of dead people’s BONES. What the fuck. What the fuck, GET IT OFF._

**It's also strong and fireproof. Now you’ve got two options. You can panic or you can get angry. Panic will get us—**

Asshole ripped the trunk of the upside-down car open and retrieved his duffel bag when it dropped. Out of the duffel bag, he pulled out a 16” Stihl chainsaw, and as he yanked the starter cord, the plastic bubbled off, the metal warped into something organic and savage, and sooty red flames boiled over the blade.

— **Apparently panic will get us dismembered.**

The bike picked up ramming speed.

**Robbie, you maybe wanna get revenge for all the dead people this chain is made of?**

The kid’s panic stilled, but the phantom bullet-holes all over his body burned colder than ever. _They shouldn’t be dead._

The kid powered on.

His rage flooded the Rider like a jet of nitrous oxide, flames exploding with the power and intensity Eli had grown to expect every time they ghosted up. They shut their front vent and blasted fire out the back, arching backward as half the tree blew away in a flare of white heat. The motorcycle hit them. The kid rammed the spike in their head into the red blood-gas ball that served as a wheel, and the spike struck spokes deep within the flames and spun once and jammed behind the front fork. The pain fed their rage. The bike’s momentum yanked them right out of the coil of bone chains and broke the other spike that pinned their wrists to the tree. The Rider punched the bike away and yanked the spike out of his skull.

The Walrus charged them with a roar, chainsaw upraised. They fell away through the shadows, dissolved into the metal of the car. Dropped out, crouched under the hood, and flipped it thirty feet in the air to land on its wheels. It T-turned to face the Walrus, scooped them up. They hauled themselves out again, hands and feet digging possessively into the roof. The Walrus whistled up his bike again and mounted it.

From the car, the Rider snarled.

“Slippery little fucker,” the Walrus said, tilting his black and thorny skull. He spooled up his chain where it had caught on his bike's...ribs. “Okay, let's rock'n'roll.”

The Rider reached through the car and pulled out his own chains, not knives, not hammers on the ends, but long sharp hooks. He lashed the air and made the chains do the whirly thing, lighting them up with his fires as they screamed and whistled above the trees. With a full-body heave, he sent the hooks flying at the Walrus. Walrus reared up on his bike, clinging to its horns, and dodged the chains on the forward throw, but not when the Rider whipped them back. The Charger took off. Eli pulled himself together long enough to open a portal, another dump site in Nevada, a canyon fifty miles from Las Vegas, all cold barren red canyons and dry riverbeds. The Rider yanked the Walrus off his bike, every bone and strut creaking with effort. Whipped him back and forth through the air, and pitched him and the chain through the open portal.

The portal sucked down as the chain rattled through.

Then more chains, blood and bone chains shot backward out the portal before it closed. Snagged the Walrus's bike. Snagged the Rider by the neck. Yanked him right out of the Charger's roof.

_**Fuck!** _

**Stay angry! There's bits of dead people touching you, boy!**

The Rider roared, fire spitting out and churning the air into a whirlwind of flame as the Walrus yanked him toward the portal by the neck. Eli lost himself to it. Being the Rider, when the kid's rage really started to let go, was like surfing a tidal wave. He had no control. He didn't want any. It was the ultimate ride.

But because Eli was lost within the fury of the Rider, he did not think to hold the portal open as they passed through it. They hit the rusty dirt of the cold Nevada desert and found themselves alone, without the car, facing the Satanic Walrus as he jerked Robbie's hook out of his chest and dusted himself off.

“Cute trick,” the Walrus rumbled. “Where are we? So I can pawn your skull for a plane ticket.”

The portal squinched shut. Suddenly a thousand miles stretched Eli between the kid and the car. It was the second worst sensation he'd ever had since he'd died. He couldn't think. Couldn't process. Couldn't get them out of there.

The Rider roared, still tanked up on the kid's rage: Pink Shorts walking away hours ago, their desperate ratty neighborhood that menaced him and his brother, betrayals from Canelo and classmates and teachers, a lifetime of poverty, his parents' abandonment, Eli's ineradicable presence in his head, and to add insult to injury, this rude cop pax who had the audacity to be stronger than him, and smell like blood and death to boot. The Rider lunged for his chains, swung them at the moment the Walrus swung his own, and they caught each-other and yanked at the same time, threw a punch an instant later. The Rider was lighter and flew further, but hit just as hard. The Walrus broke all his knuckle spikes off against the Rider's face-plates. Then he back-handed the Rider with the bony chain around his forearm.

Eli was very thin within the Rider's head. He was no longer surfing the tidal wave. He was one of the villagers it swept out to sea.

The Rider had two reactions when facing a stronger opponent: confusion, and rage. With the kid keeping his head in the game and the other ghost rider's morbid accessories sending his psychometry into conniptions, the Rider had all the rage he needed to keep pressing the fight. But Eli wasn't seeing the usual power boost. If anything, they were getting weaker by the second. Eli was being tugged in two directions, and without the car they weren't whole, so more and more it was just Robbie roaring and snarling and throwing chains and punches.

They tore at each-other like two elephant seals. Lot of power, not much damage on either side. The motorcycle tried to ram the Rider, but he vaulted over it, kicking the Walrus in the head. The Rider chained up the Walrus and tried to sling him across the canyon, but with their disparity in mass, the Walrus wasn't going anywhere. The Rider headbutted his opponent with all the force of a two-ton muscle car. The Walrus bear-hugged him and impaled him on the spikes that grew from his ribs.

**Kid. Kid, I gotta go. I gotta go get the car.**

The Rider roared, blowing fire and gasoline into the Walrus's face.

 **Kid. Don't die. I'll be right back.** Either that, or he wouldn't make it at all, just bounce between the kid and the car while this asshole tore their human body to pieces. **Are you hearing me?**

“ _What kind of monster carves his weapons out of dead people?_ ” Robbie screamed with the Rider's voice, ignoring the pain of the spikes in his chest while slamming his faceplates over and over into the Walrus's teeth. “ _What the fuck is wrong with you?_ ”

“I hear it's like nails on a chalkboard for you ghost riders,” the other ghost rider sneered back as he regrew another tusk. “They came with the costume.”

“ _ **HYAAAAAARR!!!**_ ”

**You got this, kid. Rip his head off.**

Robbie broke a spike the size of a bayonet off the other rider's shoulder, flipped it, and jammed it through the Walrus's temple.

Just then, he felt Eli tear away from him, and he was alone in his head for the first time in months. Instead of the relief he'd imagined, he felt drained. Like Eli had dragged part of Robbie's soul out with him. His fire ebbed, and he felt the cold again, the bullet wounds that had killed him.

“OW,” snarled the Walrus. He yanked his own spike out of his head with one hand and threw Robbie away by the jaw with the other. Robbie landed sprawled on his back in the sand. His chains were on the ground by the Walrus. He tried to reach through his shadow and grab them, but he just jammed his fingerbones on gravel; without Eli and the car, he couldn't reach them, and they were just lying there, dead. The Walrus swaggered toward him, looming, cruel. “You little fucker. You're gonna pay for that. Just like you're gonna pay for Detective Carl Juarez, who's still in rehab after spending two months sedated on a ventilator. 'Cause you caved in his entire fucking ribcage.” The bloody animal-bike circled around, watching Robbie from behind. “And Agent Caleb Singer. Can't even ride a desk with no working hands. Tonight you get what's coming to you. Even Ghost Riders face their Vengeance.”

“ _I don't hunt cops,_ ” Robbie gritted. Whatever Eli was doing, he needed to hurry it up.

Red fire blasted out of the Walrus's fist and slammed Robbie into the desert floor. It wasn't hot fire—that he could take. It was cold, and it ripped through his leather skin and sucked the oxygen away from his own flames, wormed into him and coiled around his bones. Robbie rolled in the dirt like they'd showed him on fire safety day. _Angry,_ he told himself. _Hold on. Stay angry._

“Yes, you do,” the Walrus snarled. “Did you listen to a thing I said?” He reached Robbie and stomped one massive spiked boot on his back. “Juarez and Singer. Undercover with the East Side Sidewinders. You put them in body casts, then did the same thing to the entire local chapter to muddy the waters.”

“ _They shouldna been playing games with my neighborhood,_ ” Robbie growled. He bucked and rolled, out from under the boot. Managed to skid between the other rider's legs, vault the taller man, spikes an all, land on the horrifying bike. There was no throttle, no brakes, barely any recognizable parts on the thing: steel and strange goopy fire and black upholstery that looked more like dried-up roadkill than leather. He squeezed it by the horns and twisted where the throttle ought to be, and the bike took off.

“Fucker!” the Walrus snarled, blasting Robbie with fire from both fists. This time, it completely snuffed Robbie out. Human again, still encased in the Rider's leather skin, he clung to the monstrosity he'd stolen, ducking his head low. He glanced over his shoulder, saw the Walrus gathering more fire around one fist. Robbie swerved. Wiped out on the bike. Slid forty feet over sharp rocks that bit right through the racing jumpsuit, skinning his thigh and forearm. The other rider was marching toward him again, unhurried. Robbie tried to ghost back up, but he couldn't manage. Just a haze of smoke. His vision grayed in and out and his arms shook as he pushed himself to his feet. The thin night air was freezing. With the gory motorcycle behind him, the other Rider's chains in front of him, and his fires snuffed out, Robbie felt the cold and the bullet wounds just as vividly as when he'd lain dying in the alley, before Eli snatched him up. He hated this thing in front of him the way a rabbit hates a fox, but he pushed that down. He had to survive.

“Please don't kill me,” Robbie said. He pulled himself as straight as he could. “I've got a brother. I take care of him, just him and me. We look out for our own, you know? I can't trust anyone else.”

“Do I look like a sucker for a guilt trip?” the Satanic Walrus demanded.

He was a seven-foot punk-rock nightmare of bloody bones, black leather, and oil fire. “No. But you're in law enforcement, right? Wouldn't that be the exact type of vigilante violence you want to stop?”

The Walrus spread his arms. “ _Look_ at me. I _am_ the exact thing I want to stop.”

A two-foot ring of fire and darkness spiraled open in the air, a few hundred yards behind the Walrus. Robbie felt Eli across the portal, thready. He hated the relief he brought. **Get to the car, kid.** Eli sounded weak. Desperate. Robbie felt with his mind for the car, and the cold retreated, the portal stabilized and expanded. Still small. Still weak.

The Walrus checked over his shoulder. “Company?” he demanded, unrolling a chain and snapping it in the air eagerly.

Robbie ran for the bike, legs weak and shaking. Between adrenaline and an advantageous slope to the ravine where it lay, he got it upright. Straddled the evil, disgusting thing. Gunned the motor. Concentrated on not skidding the fiery wheels on the unstable surface. He'd borrowed a motorcycle only twice before deciding that two wheels wasn't for him, and he knew how dangerous gravel was, even, apparently, on a mystical hell-cycle. He didn't need to win any races here. He just had to keep the rocks and wrinkles of the landscape between himself and the Walrus's fiery fists. _I'm coming, Eli._

**Make it quick.**

The Walrus was strong, but he was no faster than your average cop. Robbie rolled up and down the steep ravines and over the loose rock at ten, twenty miles an hour, gripping hard to its horns as it tried to shake him off. Slow but steady, he kept his distance and maneuvered toward the portal. If he took a spill, he'd have to race for it on foot, and he felt like he might really pass out if he tried that. And then he'd be ripped to pieces and scattered around the desert, and no one would find his body for thirty years.

He squeezed the horns for more speed when he saw the Walrus jogging toward the portal to head him off. _Eli, he's trying to block me._

**Just get through.**

Robbie plastered himself to the motorcycle and prayed he wouldn't flip the damn thing and land on his head as he gunned its throbbing engine. He was thirty yards away, the Walrus ten yards; fifteen and five, closing; the Walrus moved to block the portal, gathering fire around one raised fist, and Robbie aimed the bike straight at him, then jumped off, tucked and rolled. The bike struck the Walrus in the legs and the fireball went wide. His own fall broke something in his chest and did something horrible to one shoulder, but he made it to his feet while the Walrus and his bike disentangled themselves. The black portal was just feet in front of him. He hobbled to it and dove through.

He landed on the Charger's hood and wrapped his arms around the blower. The portal hummed behind his feet, just inches from the front bumper.

_**Oh thank god.** _

A chain shot out of the portal just before it closed, looped around Robbie's neck. They burned up in an instant. The Rider roared. Melted into the car. The chain sucked back into the portal as the other rider yanked it back, empty. Eli slammed the hole shut.

The Rider condensed into the driver's seat, overspilling with flame. Where separately they had a hard time keeping the fire going, together they had a surplus. Robbie, Eli, and the car were united at last, and all the power they'd needed five minutes ago welled up under the Rider's skin like nausea. He drooled hot steel and oil, between his teeth, out the grill and the blower of the car. The Rider's shape began to change, the teeth aching in his jawbone, the faceplates lengthening, distorting his skull. They were full of rage and it had to get out. The fight was over but they were only just now ready.

_Take us back._

**Don't be stupid.**

_He attacked us. He came to LA hunting us. We were fighting at half strength the whole time, but now we can beat the shit out of him._

**Well. It would be a good bonding experience.**

_Just do it._ The Rider opened the door and vomited a pile of molten iron into the dry grass next to the car, caught a glimpse of himself in the side mirror as he shut the door. The car felt suddenly cramped. His vents touched the ceiling. _We look like a demon. What is this doing to us?_

 **Don't worry about it.** Eli opened the portal under their nose, and the Rider stomped the gas and popped the clutch, roaring and burning in anticipation.

They jolted down hard on the wrinkled wasteland they'd just escaped. At the bottom of the ravine, the pax looked up, startled, where he'd been leaning on an Indian motorcycle in his rumpled suit and checking for cell reception. “Back for more? I can do that,” he said, tucking his phone away. As the Charger roared toward him and the Rider reared up out of its hood like a crocodile from the mud, he clenched his fists and bowed his head, growling. Tusks erupted from his cheekbones, spikes and fire everywhere else, and the motorcycle changed under him, low, flexible, organic. As the Charger built up ramming speed, he jumped. His bike darted out of their path, and the Walrus rolled over the Charger's hood, braced himself on the windshield, and wrapped one huge arm around the Rider's throat.

The Rider flipped and slammed him against the hood and bit him on the side of the neck, crushing bone and getting a mouthful of leather and hellfire.

The Walrus deliberately dug his boots into the rocks rushing under the car and let himself get pulled down and run over. He stood and threw a fireball that the Rider shrugged off with a cringe and a snarl, and then a rock that crashed straight through the front and back windows to hit the Rider in the knee.

“ _ **HRAAAAAAAH!**_ ” The Rider buckled to all fours, skidded the car around, then leapt at the Walrus like a tiger, belching out a wall of flame that lit the sandy slopes around them. They hit the ground and rolled, biting and tearing at each-other. The Charger roared past and then circled back, bouncing and skidding on the loose rock, while the Walrus's motorcycle caught up to them and started ramming the Rider every time his back was exposed. The Walrus jabbed spikes into the Rider as fast as he could free his hands and grow them back, but the spikes only enraged the Rider further: his breath burned hotter and hotter until even the other ghost rider had to turn his face away.

The Walrus grabbed one of his bike's ribs with one hand as it passed by. He gripped its seat between thighs like tree trunks and dragged the Rider along the ravine, shaking out a length of bone chain and tangling it around the Rider's jaws, then gripped the bike's horns and took off, accelerating and leaping over ridges of ancient dry rock, the Rider bouncing and rolling behind. The Charger closed on them. Nosed the Rider, who melted into the hood, leaving half a dozen spikes rolling along the ground and the chain swinging empty. It caught the other rider's chain under a front wheel. The Walrus jerked to a stop and flew into the air to be rolled over again by the Charger, while his bike screamed forward. The instant the Walrus cleared the Charger's tires, the Rider pounced on him again.

They bit. They tore. They stabbed each-other and blasted each-other with hell-fire. They ran their vehicles over each-other. They lit up the desert hills and made the air shudder with snarls and curses.

**This is fun but we're not getting anywhere.**

The Rider crushed the Walrus's shoulder in his jaws, shaking his head like a dog, even as he impaled himself on the spikes.

**Kid?**

“You like that?” the Walrus bellowed, punching the Rider in the head with his free hand. He shot a blast of hell-fire that poured between the seams of the Rider's faceplates. “How about that? How's that taste?”

The Rider's own flames were too intense, now, for the Walrus to smother. He roared again, gripping the Walrus by the tusks with one hand and the hip-bone with the other, trying to tear him in half.

**Kid.**

“You're quiet all of a sudden. How many demons you got in there?” The Walrus slung a length of chain around the Rider's chest, hooked the other end to the bike as it drove by. Kicked out as the slack ran out, freeing himself and flinging the Rider into the air to be yanked away at ninety miles an hour.

**KID!**

_He came here hunting us. He uses dead people for his weapons. He's putting Gabe at risk._

**...So we're on the same page.** The Rider disentangled himself from the chain, rolled in midair, and dropped through the roof of the Charger as it rammed into the bike. **We can't damage him hand-to-hand. Make him go away.**

_What, with a portal? He'll just come back, angrier and with a warrant. He's seen my face, Eli._

**Good, good. Excellent points. Make him go** _**away** _ **, like you did Yegor Ivanov. Remember? Chain him up and send him away. For Gabe.**

The bike skidded around to pick up the Walrus, and the Rider rose out of the Charger's trunk, swinging steel chains tipped with barbs—barbs from a harpoon Eli had experimented with for road-hauling homeless people in 1985. The Walrus slung hell-fire, the Rider ducked and flung out the chains, ripped him off the bike. Anchored his feet deep into the Charger's two tons of steel, and swung the Walrus at an approaching hill. Robbie's horror and Eli's malice supplied the Rider with a dreadful and final resolve. As the snarling mass of spikes and chains approached the hillside, the rocks began to move, and a sucking void opened between them. The Walrus passed through with a cut-off yelp and the desert closed over him.

_Wait._

The Rider gripped the chains hard against the pull on the other side of the void, stopped the Charger.

_No. No! He says we hurt undercover cops, he thinks he's doing the right thing—_

**Drop him!** Eli grew desperate. **Make it permanent!**

_He thinks we're a damn supervillain, Eli!_

**Yes?**

The Rider heaved on the chain with both hands. The chain moved where it burrowed into the earth, rocks and sand heaved back up, and then the Walrus emerged, gasping, snarling, fire guttering out and human flesh half-wrapped around charred bone and jutting tusks and horns. He wriggled in his bonds, rolling down the hill and struggling to his feet as he growled and shivered and called up his fires again. The chains tightened as the Walrus filled back out to his monstrous bulk.

**Dammit, boy!**

The Rider flung another chain around the Walrus. Hooks this time. Binding him shoulders to ankles. Then he gunned the Charger's motor and took off.

The Walrus's bike jumped the top of a ridge and swung behind them in pursuit. The Rider reeled the Walrus in before it could rescue him, grabbed him, and melted them both into the Charger, stuffing the Walrus into the back seat. _Changed my mind. We need a portal._

**To where? Pluto?**

_I don't know, let me think!_

He steered the Charger cross-ways to the creases in the desert, jolting and crashing to earth and giving their passenger as rough a ride as possible. The motorcycle kept pace with them, bounced over the top of the roof, dented it. The dent reshaped itself immediately. But it was worrisome.

“Where the fuck was that?” the Walrus snarled. “Was that Hell? Is that why you leave so few bodies, you send them all to Hell?”

_That—that's not really Hell, is it? Eli?_

**Hell is a hard place to pin down. Some say that Hell is other people. Others, Oklahoma.**

_Eli!_

**It's not Cancun!**

The Rider snarled, gushing flame.

 **I don't know, I try to stay out of the Underworlds. If we dump him in Montana—I know a site, very remote, high in the mountains. There's a chance he'd starve or die of exposure before he makes it to civilization, if no one's moved into the area since 1997,** _**and** _ **if he needs to spend most of his time in human form. That's a lot of ifs.**

_Okay. I'm thinking._

“Hey, Ghost Rider!” the Walrus bellowed, kicking the seat and shredding the upholstery with his spikes as he struggled. “Have you or have you not sent victims' bodies to Hell?”

_He's a cop._

_He's a cop who turns into a giant flaming skeleton monster and tried to kill us with a chainsaw. And he's from New York._

_Take us back to LA._

**I don't get it.**

The Rider laughed hysterically. It sounded like a seizing transmission. _I have a plan!_

The Walrus started to wriggle one elbow loose.

_Take us right back where we left, we need his luggage. Then a police station. Any police station._

**On it.**

The Charger fish-tailed a bit, knocking the bike aside as it closed toward their rear quarter. A burning ring of darkness exploded under their nose fast as a firework, and as they dove into it, it closed up behind them.

In the cold Nevada desert, an Indian Scout with California plates tipped over and skidded lifelessly over the rocks.

 

* * *

 

 

Early commuters and late-night truckers on the Pomona Freeway just before the dawn saw a horror and spectacle more fit for Hollywood or New York City than East Los Angeles: a supercharged muscle car streaking westward at two hundred miles an hour, spurting flame from every vent and seam, a continuously exploding mechanical comet. Half-in, half-out of its roof, a demon made from leather, fire, and steel slugged another fiery demon, bound in chains, over and over again in its black animal-skull face. The car drove itself, swerving through six lanes of traffic and leaving burning streaks of rubber in its path. After less than ten miles it abruptly plowed right through the freeway median, across oncoming traffic, and rammed a hole through the twelve-foot concrete wall that separated the freeway from Belvedere park. It blazed over the patchy grass without slowing, straight into an artificial lake.

Water and steam fountained into the air, a shape like great wings, while the car sped across its surface propelled by the force of the water boiling under its wheels, all while the one demon wrapped the other in thicker and thicker layers of burning chains.

The car burned the grass when it crossed the lake. It slowed, great engine still roaring with the demon's every punch, and skidded into the sprawling parking lot of the East Los Angeles County Sheriff's Patrol Station.

Officers manning the desks on the night shift ducked for cover and drew their service pistols when a heavy black duffel bag crashed through the front window's reinforced glass like an evidentiary brick, followed by five hundred pounds of steel chains, spikes, and burning bones, like the world's largest flaming bag of dogshit. The coil of chains wriggled and cursed in the wreckage of a crushed desk. Half the officers trained their guns on the flaming skeleton, the other half raced to investigate the window.

Outside rumbled a late '60's muscle coupe that fountained supernatural fire straight into the air, and on the roof crouched a sinister black-clad figure whose savage jaws drooled lava and gleamed like chrome in the floodlights.

It raised one hand and pointed into the police station. A rookie started firing, and three others joined in; the hail of bullets punched holes through the creature's skin that gushed flame for an instant before sealing up again. It shook itself, coughed like a car back-firing, and then in a voice like an unmuffled V8 revving behind a starting line, it bellowed, “ _ **Cop killer! Stay out of Los Angeles!**_ ” The car reversed halfway out the parking lot, paused, then roared back in front of the window, the creature still surfing on the roof. “ _ **Check the luggage! He's a cop killer! Check the luggage!**_ ”

Then it reversed again and screamed away through the pre-dawn twilight, outstripping the two patrol cars that took off after it.

Inside the station, two deputies and a sergeant aimed their pistols at the bundle of fire and chains, while another deputy examined the luggage. “Flight from New York, Delta Airlines. ID tag is for a Lt. Michael Badilino.” The deputy cautiously unzipped the bag.

“What do you think you're doing, wait for the bomb squad!” the sergeant bellowed.

Inside was a pile of men's clothing, a shaving kit, three hard-shell gun cases with separate shipping labels, and a worn set of leather shoulder-holsters, the same brand the Sergeant himself favored.

“Maybe that Leyenda cabrón thinks he's on the side of the angels,” the sergeant muttered. “Vargas! Call the SHIELD containment hotline, we got ourselves an enhanced! Or something! And Paulson, run that name, find out if that Lieutenant Badilino is real and when he was last seen!”

“Yessir!”

“Before that, Paulson, find a cell for this guy. If he killed an officer—”

“We'll do whatever it takes to hold him until SHIELD gets here.”

The bundle of chains rolled awkwardly onto its back. “Oh, fuck me.”

“Yeah. You might say that. See, we take care of our own in this profession. Including our brothers from the East Coast.”

“Believe me,” Lt. Michael Badilino growled through fire and tusks and the other ghost rider's chains, “I know.”

 

* * *

 

 **That was short-sighted and idiotic,** Eli scolded as the Rider faded back into the car on the highway back toward Hillrock Heights. **I'm telling you now. Because when he comes back after us, I might not have time.**

 _He was trying to do the right thing,_ Robbie replied. _I think._

**On the other hand. I have staged many, many suicides. But never have I ever framed a man for his own murder.**

The Rider chuckled. _Yeah, I'd love to be a fly on the wall while he tries to explain himself._

**Don't get your head swelled.**

They roared on, took an exit, spiraled down the off-ramp. _It's almost morning. We've been out all night._ They let the fires die down. _You're a monster and I still hate you. But we make a pretty...good...team..._

The kid snuffed out abruptly, and collapsed, striking his face on the steering wheel. The car engine clunked and died. A Mercedes whizzed down the off-ramp behind them, laid on the horn, and nearly hit them.

**Kid?**

No answer. The body was heavy around him as Eli filled it out. He turned the ignition and the alternator chugged, whined. The gas gauge was empty. The gas was _never_ empty, the Charger didn't need gas anymore. Did it?

Speaking of empty, the kid's body was nearly inoperable. Cold. Shaking. Blurred vision.

He flicked on the hazard lights and gave the ignition another twist. The motor started with a hollow chuffing sound, and he got the car moving—down the off-ramp, over to the shoulder. And that's all she wrote. That was the last of the fumes. “ **Fuck,** ” he muttered. “ **Kid better not bitch about spending our money on a gas can...** ” He looked down. He was wearing the Rider's racing suit. Robbie's wallet was in Robbie's other pants. “ **Fuck. I always thought I was too good to knock over a 7-11.** ” Eli got out of the car. He had to stop and catch himself on the roof, scratched the paint with the keys clutched in his hand. “ **Figures,** ” he grunted. First time in almost a month he'd gotten the body all to himself, and it needed a shot of amphetamines or a trip to the hospital.

He got his feet under him and trudged up the freeway off-ramp, high enough to spot a Chevron sign glowing in the twilight. Then he walked, clutching his keys like a woman crossing a parking lot, because the racing jumpsuit didn't have any pockets.

When he reached the convenience store, he had to lean on the door handle before he let himself inside. The harsh lights made his head ache fiercely. There were LEDs everywhere, bluish, sharp. He picked his way up and down the aisles. ATM by the window; not his specialty, and he didn't have the tools. He could wait for someone to come in for cash, then follow them out. At the counter, one woman, taller than the kid, at least forty pounds and ten years on him, watching him suspiciously—not promising. He found a tire iron for sale near the engine oil and flipped it through the air experimentally. He missed the catch and dropped it on the floor, then collapsed in frustration next to it. His hand was shaking.

Now the woman at the counter was really suspicious.

“ **Why.** ” He scraped his hands through the kid's hair, then in a fit of spite, pulled the stupid guages out of his ears and threw them across the floor. His earlobes dangled like chicken wattles. Suddenly self-conscious, he crawled across the aisle, brushed dust bunnies off the plugs, and eased them back in. “ **Think. Think. Okay.** ” He pushed himself to his feet and staggered to the refrigerator shelves. Ranks of unfamiliar drink brands confronted him. What the hell happened to just a Dr. Pepper. He grabbed a “Rockstar,” examined the ingredients. High fructose corn syrup and half a GNC's worth of vitamins and herbal extracts. He put it back and pulled out a Coke. Cracked the seal.

“You better pay for that before you leave,” snapped the cashier.

Eli turned around and looked her in the eye while he took a swig. The drink burned up his nose and his throat rebelled against swallowing; he coughed, misting the floor and the shelf with cola and saliva. Got the next swallow down. His stomach cramped painfully and he fell against the refrigerator door.

“Fuckin’ junkie,” the cashier muttered. Eli would have killed her for that, if the store didn’t have a black globe of security camera in every corner, and if he could manage to lift a goddamn tire iron. He eased himself over to the counter and braced himself against it.

“ **I need to use your phone,** ” he said. “ **My buddy. I’m stranded, and I need money for gas.** ”

She gave him the stink-eye for a long time. Then she relented. “Pay phone’s broke. I’ll let you use the desk phone. _Don’t move._ ”

A tiny, sleek, and very dusty cordless phone on a cradle appeared on the counter in Eli’s stuttering vision. He stared down at the keypad and took another painful sip of Coke. Put the keys down. “ **Phone book?** ”

She raised an eyebrow. Eli nodded to himself. No phone books in the Future. He was lucky they still had toilet paper.

He picked up the handset, stabbed out the local area code, and let the kid’s muscle memory take over. Listened to the ring tone; there were curious pauses before the rings started. Lag. Everything was digital now. He listened to it ring and ring, and then a recorded voice answered, “You have reached the Patrick Welman Development Center service desk. We are currently away from the office—”

He hung up.

Figured. The kid didn’t have friends. He didn’t have a life. Just his brother, his job, Eli, and the car. It was pathetic.

He tried the other local area code he knew, looking away from the keypad, and the kid’s hand hesitated, then tapped out seven more digits. It rang twice, and then there was a rustle, a short pause.

A child’s voice. “Hello.”

Gabriel Reyes. Eli suddenly regretted shoving the child's mother down a flight of stairs in her third trimester. “ **Hi...Gabbie. Gabe. It’s your brother.** ”

“Robbie?” Kid sounded scared. Smart. Unfortunately.

“ **Yeah, it’s me, Robbie.** ”

“Robbie-Robbie?”

Come on. Eli ran over the scripts in his head, the kid’s continual inane and repetitive interactions with Gabe. “ **Yeah, buddy, it’s me. It’s Robbie. Listen, I have a problem. I’m stuck. The car ran out of gas and I need someone to pick me up. Can you get a pen?** ”

There was a rustling noise.

“ **Kid. Kid?** ”

No answer. No breathing. Eli clung to the phone in his hand while the cashier glared at him.

At last there was another rustling noise, and breathing again down the line. “I found a pen, Robbie. And I found paper.”

“ **Good. That’s great,** ” Eli said, imagining how hard he’d be kicking himself if he’d had to specify paper. “ **I’m going to give you some names and numbers now. Can you write them down?** ”

“Yeah.”

Eli gave Gabriel the street address, slowly. Gabriel repeated it back to him, slow, correct. “ **Good. Very good. Okay, does Ro—I mean, I need you to call a friend for me. To come pick me up. Uh...someone who can drive.** ”

“Mrs. Valenzuela can drive.”

Eli bowed his head and massaged the kid’s forehead, over the hard V-shaped mark where the front vent showed through. “ **That’s great. Buddy, I need you to please call Mrs. Valenzuela and ask her to come pick me up at this address.** ”

“Okay, Robbie,” Gabriel replied. And then he hung up.

Great.

“Are you done?” the cashier asked, as Eli stared down at the phone in his hand.

“ **Apparently,** ” he grunted. He dropped the handset and leaned on the counter, staring at her and sipping the Coke.

“Go wait over there,” she ordered, pointing at a spot by the Slushie machine.

Eli bared his teeth impotently. Fucking cameras. Fucking human bodies. This bitch could probably snap him over her knee.

He leaned against the wall and closed his eyes. Belched from the Coke and it burned the back of his nose. Felt his knees start to buckle and he lowered himself slowly to the floor, holding the Coke bottle between shaking fingers, gripping the keys in his other hand.

Customers passed in and out of the convenience store, grabbing coffee, cigarettes, chewing tobacco. Eli didn't move except to open his eyes in case they tried to approach him. Terrible Future rap/pop music trickled through the speakers. The kid's stomach threatened to rebel at the second half of the Coke bottle, and he let it grow warm and flat.

“Roberto Reyes?” called a voice from the front door.

Eli pushed off against the wall and rose, swaying, to his feet. It was not Mrs. Valenzuela. It was her husband.

He'd be damned if he ever did the kid's “Yes, sir, no, sir” bit. Even if Mr. Valenzuela did have six inches on him.

“Evie told me to come get you,” Mr. Valenzuela said in Spanish, looking Eli up and down with flat dark eyes behind his glasses.

“ **Here I am** ,” Eli replied in the same language. “ **Just need a couple gallons of premium and I'll be out of your hair.** ”

The cashier interrupted them. “And pay for the Coke.”

“ **And a bottle of Coke,** ” Eli added. Mr. Valenzuela arched an eyebrow. “ **Low blood sugar.** ”

“And you don't have money.”

Eli shrugged.

“I'll expect it paid back within a month. Evie has already been very generous to you.” He gave the cashier a twenty dollar bill. “Put the cola on this. Put the rest on Pump One.”

Twenty bucks didn't stretch as far as it once did. Eli clutched his keys and cola to his chest and followed Mr. Valenzuela resentfully out the door.

His rescuer drove an older but well-maintained Jeep Cherokee. The front seats were protected by worn, hand-crocheted seat covers. Eli slumped in the passenger seat while Mr. Valenzuela filled a small gas can from the back of the SUV. They drove three blocks back to the freeway, and Mr. Valenzuela parked just ahead of the Charger, poured the gas into the tank for Eli.

“You need to be more careful,” Mr. Valenzuela said sternly as Eli lowered himself shakily to the driver's seat. “You have too many responsibilities. Surround yourself with good people and avoid dangerous situations.”

“ **Hgfeh,** ” Eli scoffed. He sat sideways on the front seat, half-in and half-out of the car with his head between his knees.

“Maybe I should drive you home.”

“ **I'll be fine in a minute.** ”

“Call my wife when you arrive.”

“ **I asked for a lift, not a lecture.** ”

Mr. Valenzuela turned, got in the Jeep, and drove off.

Eli stared at the gritty tarmac, weak, nauseated, miserable. His mouth was bone-dry, but he couldn't take any more cola at the moment. His pulse was fast, but this body was eighteen; two-twenty wasn't that fast for an eighteen-year-old—right?

He forced himself upright again and started the car. The engine rocked him with its comforting rumble and the gas gauge climbed just above empty, and suddenly he felt fifty percent less awful. He felt like an idiot. He'd been letting the kid drive the car around empty for months, ignoring the fact that even with magic, someone had to pay the piper. They'd been running the car off the kid. They'd been running the Ghost Rider off the kid. They'd sucked the kid dry. This was completely fixable.

He clutched the wheel and rested his head against the steering column. When he felt the tremor subside, he took another cautious sip of cola and put the car in gear. He would go back to Hillrock Heights soon. Gabriel Reyes would survive the morning without Robbie's hovering, but Robbie's body needed sleep and calories. There was nothing Eli needed to do in it that was so urgent that he'd rather put up with the misery than start recovering and risk the kid waking up.

Almost nothing.

He left the underpass and headed out into a commercial zone, peering into streets and alleys as he went. He saw a dog sleeping on a blanket next to a pile of cardboard and knew he was getting close; he left that one alone, though. He knew better than to attack a transient with a dog, not without a firearm. He slowed and kept looking, for bundles, piles, blankets. He checked for cameras. There was razor wire on top of every building around here, but the cameras were a little sparse.

He spotted a sleeping shape, the proper size and dimension camouflaged under blankets and waste paper. Left the car around the block, walked back. Scanned for cameras one last time: just one on this whole stretch of road, pointing at the entrance of its own building and not at the gap between the two grubby cinderblock buildings where someone thought they could be invisible enough to survive one more night in the open.

At the entrance to the alley, he stopped. Scanned up and down for more mounds of detritus large enough to camouflage a human. Approached his chosen prey. A layer of flattened cardboard peeked out from beneath the edges of an olive drab sleeping bag with stuffing poking out through holes in the corners; more cardboard, smaller broken-down boxes, had been tugged over the top of the pile to break up its outline. A swelling in the middle of the pile could be a person's hips, or their bundled belongings. Eli stared down at the pile for a long minute, watching for where the slight motions of breathing made the blanket rise and fall. The figure twitched as he watched, and he tensed, all his focus riveted to the person at his feet. They twitched, but they did not wake up, and their breathing was steady. A foot emerged from beneath the edge of the blanket, the sole facing Eli. Looked like a men's size 8 sneaker.

The pile of blankets and cardboard reshaped itself in his mind's eye. A human being curled on their side around a large back-pack, facing away from him. Same height as the kid or shorter, same weight or less. The head deep under the blankets, tucked in around one arm. Age and sex could be anything, but that didn't matter. It was a human being, and it was alive.

Eli shifted from foot to foot, silently, testing the kid's strength. He was no longer wobbly. Now he just felt like he was caught in the grip of the worst 'flu of his life. He would only get one shot at this, and he had to take it: with luck, skill, and patience, he could punch this ticket and get away. No play-time. No strangling.

Nothing like a deadline to take the fun out of something he'd enjoyed.

He waited. Another car drove by, not slowing, and he ignored it. Stood over the sleeping person, watching. This would be so much easier if he could see their face.

They twitched again, the blankets moving just a fraction over the larger part of the mass, and the image in Eli's mind solidified. He had found the head.

He bent his knees, flexing the kid's thighs, warming them up as the blood pounded in his ears, his eyes fixed on the spot where the person's head lay pillowed on a thin layer of cardboard and concealed by nylon and stuffing. Waited, waited. The blankets were still.

Eli was ready. He jumped, high. Brought his knees up. Slammed down on his target with one heel, felt and heard a satisfying crunch. Stumbled and caught himself against the nearby wall, spun, and knelt hard on the figure beneath the blankets as the limbs jerked and twitched, and quickly went still. He smelled fresh urine. Kept his hand on the person's chest, felt a tremor running through it, deep gasps, but nothing purposeful. False breaths. Felt the head, found a deep dent in the skull, a grating sensation as bone fragments moved against each-other.

He let out a long hard breath. Instead of the usual high of the kill, now it was just relief. He sagged, bracing his hand on his victim's shattered skull. His vision blurred and he wiped his face on his shoulder. The kid was a crier. Always stressed. Nothing to do with Eli.

With his finger, he traced a south-facing pentagram over the blankets. “ **Ave, Domine Inferi,** ” he muttered, familiar words running together in his haste. “ **Hanc mercedem mortuum tuum. Ponere cum servo tuo contractus. Domine Inferi, Ave.** ” Thirteen repetitions, he needed, and by the third recitation the words began to flow along without conscious input, sure sign that someone was listening, and it was all he could do to keep his voice down, avoid drawing attention to himself. He finished in a daze, pushed himself back up, loose-limbed. He'd done it. He'd made a kill in time, and he hadn't gotten any blood on the Rider's skin that the kid might smell, no prints, no human witnesses.

The relief sucked all the fear and steel out of him. He felt like a parade balloon with the air half-let-out: weak from the release of tension that had given him form. Purposeless. Ill. He was so tired, the kid was so tired. He left the body where it lay, invisible in death as it had been in sleep, and trudged back to the car. Got on the correct arterial and returned, just as dawn broke, to the Reyes place in Hillrock Heights.

When he let himself in to the apartment, little Gabriel was waiting in his wheelchair by the window.

“Robbie?” Timorous.

Eli thought he knew the correct call-and-response here. Say yes. Say yes again. Accept whatever Gabriel handed to him and act interested in it. Make eye contact. Hover. Fix breakfast. It was a terrible idea and Eli refused to do it. Just because Gabbie was a little “delayed” and still thought flailing his action figures through the air and slathering himself with ice cream was the height of entertainment, didn't mean it was all Care Bears and marshmallows in his skull. He was a noble, self-sacrificing little pain in Eli's ass, much like his brother—and his father, come to think of it. Short-Bus put up a brave front, but he could never be certain which version of Robbie he was looking at at any given time, and it was turning him into a nervous wreck. Faking him out this time would make things worse, possibly bad enough for Robbie to snap and do something irreversible to himself and Eli both.

“ **No, I'm not,** ” Eli said, shutting and locking the front door. Gabriel whirred away from him, eyes very wide, lip trembling. “ **I'm your old Conscience. Remember me?** ”

“I want Robbie. Go away,” Gabe sniffled.

“ **Well, too bad. Robbie's asleep.** ” Eli slouched into the kitchen and started opening all the cupboard doors and shuffling things around. Found a big canister of off-brand hot chocolate mix. Put the kettle on. Out in the living room, Gabriel began to bawl. “ **Kid, just get to school and don't worry about it. Your brother'll be awake when you get back.** ” Eli ran his finger around the collar of the Rider's jumpsuit. It was comfortable, for a one-piece shell of leather, steel, and kevlar, but it didn't have any zippers or velcro and he was starting to feel claustrophobic. He grabbed a kitchen knife, but the thought of cutting his way out of the suit made him just as queasy as the thought of cutting himself. He put the knife back. Wondered how long it would take for him and the kid to be strong enough to ghost up again. Get the kid's wallet and phone back.

The phone. He probably ought to call the Valenzuelas. Alienating the kid from potential babysitters was the last thing he needed to do. Oh, and he should contact Canelo's place, tell the old jackass he'd been mugged and couldn't come in.

He left the stove on, stalked back through the house. Found Gabriel in his room, on the floor in front of his chair, putting on his shoes and crutches. “ **Gimme your phone.** ”

“No!” Gabriel shrieked. Clutched one of his pockets protectively.

“ **I'll give it back.** ”

Gabriel shuffled backward on his elbows, pushing weakly with his legs. “No!”

“ **Kid.** ” Eli grabbed him by the collar, and Gabriel whacked him in the eye with the one crutch he'd managed to put on. Eli's vision burst in red stars. He snarled.

 _I will take us both to Hell,_ Robbie had warned him.

Fine.

Eli pulled a Robbie and stuffed his rage down into a deep dark hole inside himself where it could fester and eat him away from within. No black eyes for Gabbie. No holes in Gabbie's walls. Fine.

“ **I ain't gonna hurt you,** ” Eli said, grabbing the foot of the crutch in his fist. “ **I will** _ **never**_ **hurt you. Okay? I gotta borrow your phone.** ”

“You're a liar,” Gabriel sobbed.

“ **Yes! I lied! But I never hurt you!** ” Eli pinned the boy to the ground and fished the phone out of his pocket. Used the second speed-dial to call Mrs. Valenzuela, stood abruptly, and left and shut the door so no one down the line would hear the child screaming.

“Hello? Gabriel?” Evie Valenzuela answered. Her measured, gentle voice grated on Eli's shot nerves.

“ **It's Roberto. Just calling to say I made it home safe.** ”

“Oh, thank-you, Roberto. That's a load off my mind. Are you feeling all right? Jorge says you looked sick.”

“ **No, I'm fine. Tell your husband thanks for the lift, and I'll have that twenty for him by end-of-month.** ”

“What—Jorge!”

Tinny, across the room. “¿Que pasa?”

“You _lent him_ gas money?”

“¿Si?”

Eli hung up. The kettle started shrieking. He turned the stove off, filled a mug with hot water, and dumped about a quarter cup of hot chocolate mix in. Stirred it a bit so the chunks of powder started to break up. Then he checked the shelf above the phone jack where the phone books went.

No phone books. This place hadn't belonged to Alberto Reyes in over a decade.

Think. Think.

The Internet.

He booted up the kid's frighteningly powerful refurbished laptop, asked Google, and received an intimidating set of phone numbers, addresses, and customer reviews for every business in Los Angeles with “Canelo” in the name. He found the correct Canelo's at the top of the list, and dialed on the Jitterbug's insultingly large buttons. It rang six times, then went to voicemail. Fine. “ **This is Reyes. I have the 'flu and I'm not coming in.** ” Snap. Done. He returned to the kitchen, dropped the phone on the table, and hunched over the hot chocolate. Tried an experimental mouthful. It went down like the cola had: slowly and painfully.

He could really use some of his mama's champurrado about now. Never did get along with the woman, but she made amazing hot cocoa, richly spiced and so thick you could roll it around on your tongue, really take your time. He wished she'd taught him.

He carried the hot chocolate to the couch, wrapped an old polyester blanket around the Rider's skin, and lay down, shutting his eyes as the mug cooled in his gloved hands. His stomach gradually stopped cramping and started to churn more productively. He curled onto his side every now and then to take more sips, the rest of the time he watched sparks dance behind his closed eyelids.

From the hall, sniffling, thumping, shuffling. Little Gabriel was all ready to go with his crutches and backpack. “I'm sorry I hit your face,” Gabriel said, voice wobbly.

“ **Good,** ” Eli said without opening his eyes. “ **It hurts.** ” He heard the kid shuffling around the kitchen, biting into an apple. Breakfast. Oh, yes. “ **Do you need toast or something?** ”

“No, thank-you.”

“ **Don't forget your phone. Lock up when you leave.** ”

“Okay, Conscience.”

“ **It's Eli. Uncle Eli. That means we're family, okay? You don't have to be so goddamn terrified.** ”

“Okay,” Gabriel said, subdued.

Eli finished the hot chocolate and slept. When Gabriel returned from school and let himself in, the body was still sleeping.

At ten PM, it was Robbie who woke up. “Gabe!” he yelled in a panic.

“Robbie!” Gabe answered from the floor, where he'd moved his blankets and crutches and pillows and camped out between the couch and the coffee table.

Robbie pried himself upright on shaking limbs. “Gabe! Buddy!” He slid off the couch and into his brother's arms. “Are you okay? What happened, what are you doing out here?”

“You came back,” Gabe sobbed into his shoulder.

“Yeah. Yeah. I'm here.” _Eli?_ He was starving. Last thing he remembered, it was morning and he'd been taking an off-ramp toward Hillrock Heights. Now it was dark. He was home. He was gripping Gabe's shoulders with the Rider's gloves.

 **You wore yourself out and had to take the day off,** Eli informed him. **Don't worry. I took good care of you both.**

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to heeeymackelena for pointing me to champurrado as a Grandma's House-worthy comfort drink! (Robbie's grandma. Eli's mom.)  
> (Everyone comes from somewhere.)
> 
> Warnings:  
> This chapter contains rape (not graphic, not Robbie or Eli) in the first third. Nora and some other sex workers are assaulted by clients. Robbie helps them get away safely.  
> This chapter also contains Eli murdering an innocent person, from Eli's POV, in the last third. To avoid this, skip from "Almost nothing" to "Ave Domini Inferi."


	4. Cranberry white chocolate cookies give a new twist to chocolate chip cookies.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lisa takes Robbie to meet her parents. Robbie and Eli make final preparations to take out Alex Northwick.

Uber would be a lot less profitable now Robbie had to put gas in the Charger.

Maybe he could go halvesies, he wondered, watching the dollars wind up on the gas pump just before dawn. Let the tank run dry half the time. Skip meals the other half. As long as he didn't ghost up too often—he might keep ahead on his costs?

He needed to work for Canelo full-time, day shift. First get back on Canelo's good side. Demonstrate his maturity by publicly making up with Ramón Cordova. Take as many shifts as he could—on evening shifts he could call Gabe on breaks, and it would be temporary anyway. Keep his head down, don't let Eli scare the customers. Pass his GED, get hired on officially with a W-2 and insurance and everything. Angle for additional training: Roberto Reyes: Certified Automotive Technician. Open up his job prospects. It'd take a year or two to save up enough to move, but he'd do it. He'd leave Hillrock Heights behind, never have to explain away gunshots or tell Gabe not to look as they passed a crime scene ever again.

He'd leave everything behind. Move to a nice, quiet suburb. The kind he dropped off alcoholics at, at two in the morning. The kind the coke dealers caught rides to sell at. The kind where white men in button-down shirts and salmon-colored shorts lived. Move from where the decay was obvious to where it was concealed.

Leave Mrs. Valenzuela's patience and her husband's watchfulness. Leave Canelo's shop, where he had to count his cash every time he got paid but at least his skills were trusted. Rip Gabe away from the friends he'd made at school. Move to a new neighborhood of Lisas and Gueros and Valenzuelas and Cordovas with no one to tell him which was which.

The gas pump shut off and Robbie set the nozzle back in its cradle, careful not to drip gasoline on his paint. He drove West on the San Fernando Freeway in the twilight, took the exit for La Tuna Canyon Road, parked the Charger at a trailhead. He hiked up along the side of a hill of dry grass and scrub trees overlooking the winding two-lane road below.

At 5:32 AM, a lime-green open-top Lotus Elise buzzed by.

Robbie took his knife out, rolled up his jeans, and nicked the less sensitive skin on the front of his shin, just enough to draw a few drops of blood. He smeared it carefully on the trunk of an old pine tree, low to the ground and on the opposite side from the road. He got back in the car and drove home, taking his phone off airplane mode as he stopped at a light on the way.

**Hey, stop here. I want some champurrado.**

Robbie shrugged and pulled in to a panaderia. Got himself and Eli an eight-ounce champurrado in a paper go-cup. No harm in indulging Eli in the only innocent thing he'd ever asked for.

 

* * *

 

Later that week, he arrived early for Gabe's monthly session with Doctor DaCosta so he could ask for information on mental health resources. Most of the available counselors specialized in substance abuse, which was one mental health problem Robbie did not have. He filled out forms and collected pamphlets. Hopefully he'd turn up somebody who could help with intrusive thoughts, violent impulses, and multiple personality disorder. Something for people who weren't seeking help because of a court order.

_No comments?_

**Try all the shrinks you want. I'm not worried.**

He texted Lisa.

-Hey, can I get the recipe for those cookies you brought?

Her reply came an hour later—a link to a cooking blog. Then:

-You want to come over to my house and make them?

-I still have left-over ingredients.

-Bring Gabe! I have more movies

Robbie stared down at the phone. He didn't think he'd ever been invited to someone else's house before, not unless it was “for his own good” or they felt sorry for him.

**She feels sorry for you.**

Robbie checked his schedule and replied.

-Ill ask him. Friday evening good?

-Sounds great! Come by any time! :-)

Then,

-My parents will love to meet you!

Robbie stared at her text and felt one eyebrow try to crawl all the way up into his hair. “Oooookay,” he muttered.

 

* * *

 

Since the last time Gabe had met Lisa had gone so well, Gabe was enthusiastic about the idea of going to her house to bake cookies. “I'll take Ninja Wolf, and Ninja Wolf's Best Friend, and Mr. Fuji, and _Car And Driver,_ and _Cosmic Laser—”_

“Make sure it all fits in your backpack so you don't lose anything, okay, buddy?”

“Okay, Robbie!”

He insisted on going on his crutches, even though he was usually tired enough to prefer the chair in the evenings. Robbie lugged the power chair out to the car and stowed it in the trunk just in case.

On Friday evening after school, Robbie and Gabe pulled up to Lisa's house in the Charger. Their home looked exactly like any of the little ranch houses on Robbie's street, except the lawn was mostly green. He knocked on the door and a tall, dour, red-headed man answered.

“Can I help you?”

Robbie rubbed Gabe's shoulder with his free hand. “Yes, sir. I'm Roberto Reyes, this is my brother Gabe. Lisa invited us.”

“Right,” the man said, expression still flat. “Come in, then.”

“Hello!” Gabe said as they crossed the threshold. He grinned up at the man. If his arms weren't busy with the crutches, Robbie knew he'd be waving.

“Hello,” the man replied. He shut the door behind them and followed them in, half a step behind.

The inside of Lisa's house smelled odd, like a store display. The smell was coming from a giant candle in a jar on the living room coffee table. The house had a nice thick carpet with fresh, perfectly straight vacuum track marks all over. Past the living room was the kitchen, where jars and canisters sat out on the counter, waiting. Beyond was the dining room, which was set for dinner with a plate and a glass and a cloth napkin and a set of metal utensils at each matching chair. Beyond that was a set of clean sliding-glass doors looking out on a small, tidy back yard. A tall woman holding a plate of steaming vegetables jerked the door open and banged the plate neatly on the table. She looked Gabe and Robbie up and down sternly.

“Hello!” Gabe said again.

“Hi, honey,” the woman replied. She turned to Robbie. “You must be Lisa's 'friend.'”

Robbie wasn't sure his relationship with Lisa merited quotation marks at this point. He introduced himself again. He was polite, but this place was putting his back up.

“Lisa! Annie!” the woman yelled, turning away. “Come to dinner!”

Soft footsteps on the hall carpet. “Lisa!” Gabe yelled, crutching away from Robbie.

“Hi, Gabe!” Lisa exclaimed, trotting into view as she finished putting in a big earring shaped like an owl. It appeared to be made from carefully cut feathers. “Robbie! Thanks for coming! I'm so glad you guys made it!”

“Hey,” Robbie replied. “I—we weren't expecting dinner.”

“Of course! Sorry, I assumed—”

“Don't worry about it,” her mother interrupted. “Annie! Get out here and come to dinner! It's fajitas! You like fajitas! Lisa, go get some sour cream and the salsa. And chop some of that cilantro.” She turned abruptly and walked back to the patio. Lisa's father silently drew out a chair and sat at the head of the table. There was a pitcher of water next to him, but he made no move to take it.

“Are we going to eat dinner again?” Gabe asked.

“Yeah, buddy. Looks like it.” He picked a chair at random and pulled it away from the table, helped Gabe scoot up into it, and then lifted the chair in. Got Gabe's crutches propped up and accessible, and his backpack slung over the back of the chair.

“Yay!” Gabe picked up his fork and started squeaking the tines back and forth against the plate.

Lisa's mother returned with another plate, this one loaded with steaming and slightly charred strips of steak, and a basket with a dishtowel in it. “Annie!” she bellowed, setting the meat down. “Get your little butt out here right now!”

“Is there food?” came a sullen voice from down the hall.

“Yes! I've been telling you!”

“You always say that.”

“There's food,” Robbie contributed, sitting down himself.

“It doesn't matter if there's food or not, it is time to come to the table for dinner!”

Lisa appeared at Robbie's elbow, smiling, and set down a tiny bowl of chopped cilantro, a tub of picante sauce, and a pint of sour cream with spoons in them. “Thanks for coming!”

“Uh, no problem.”

Hard, stumping footsteps down the hall. A short, awkward girl with choppy black-dyed hair and freckles appeared. “Which one's Lisa's boyfriend?”

“Kya-hah! You're silly!” Gabe switched from squeaking his fork to bouncing the blade of his table knife on the plate.

Robbie stood, leaned over the table, and grabbed the water pitcher. Filled his and Gabe's glasses, two thirds full like always.

“Sit!” Lisa's mother ordered, and everyone sat: the mother opposite the father, Robbie and Gabe on one side of the table with Gabe closer to the mother, and Annie as far from her mother as she could get, so next to her father and across from Robbie. Lisa sat beside her mother, across from Gabe. “Clyde, say Grace.”

Robbie nearly jumped out of his skin when Lisa's father grabbed his hand. His grip wasn't hard, but it was startling. He looked around the table and everyone else was holding hands, even Annie, who was rolling her eyes. Gabe was holding Lisa's mother's hand, and reaching for Robbie's. Robbie took it.

Lisa's father, Clyde, spoke. “Our Father in heaven. Thank-you for this food. Thank-you for our visitors who will enjoy it with us.” Robbie looked around and noticed that everyone else had their eyes closed. He squinted in case anyone else was peeking. It had been...a very long time since anyone had blessed his dinner. “We ask that you bless this food and everyone under this roof, guide us, and keep us safe. In Jesus' name we pray, Amen.”

“Thank-you, Clyde. Lisa, start passing the tortillas.” They moved plates and bowls around the table in a clockwise direction. With assembly-line precision, they each stacked strips of meat, a few lightly charred peppers and onions, a dollop of sour cream, salsa, and cilantro on a warm wheat-flour tortilla. Robbie got to work immediately cutting Gabe's fixings into smaller pieces. Gabe had some issues with swallowing. Big chunks of meat and vegetables were likely to give him problems.

“How old is he?” Annie asked.

“I'm fourteen,” Gabe replied.

“What's wrong with him?”

“ _Annie!_ ” An angry chorus from the rest of Lisa's family. Robbie gritted his teeth.

Gabe looked around the table with a worried expression. “Hello, my name is Gabe. What's yours?” he asked Annie.

“It's Ann,” Annie said. “No E.”

“Hello, Ann!”

“...Hello, Gabe,” Ann replied.

Lisa's mother cleared her throat. “So, Robbie. Lisa tells me you...quit school?”

“Independent GED study,” Robbie said, swallowing hard around tepidly seasoned and slightly dry steak. “It frees up more time to work and hang out with Gabe.”

“Oh, yes. You're a caretaker.”

“He's my brother.”

“Robbie's the best!” Gabe chimed in. “He's the coolest! He knows so much about cars!”

“Robbie's a mechanic,” Lisa said.

The mother's green eyes were never still, darting up and down Robbie's figure and between him and Gabe. “Legally? Or...”

“Shelly,” said the father mildly.

“Sorry for prying. I'm sure you're a very hard worker.”

“I am. And I have friends who are articulate.” Robbie bit the words out, nothing at all like Eli's drawl, but hiding the same hostility.

“Annie, no phones at the table.”

Ann looked up with a sneer, then hunched and put her cell phone away.

“Do you want to play with Mr. Fuji?” Gabe offered her.

“What?”

Gabe twisted around on his seat and got the backpack into his lap. Pulled out his Mr. Fuji action figure—Ninja Wolf's side-kick from the comics, lately replaced in Gabe's esteem by Ninja Wolf's Best Friend. He tossed it across the table and it thunked against Ann's plate.

Ann looked up across the table at him, startled.

“No toys at the table.” The mother grabbed the action figure, and made as if to set it on the floor, out of Gabe's reach.

Robbie half-rose from his seat, hissing.

“Ex- _cuse_ me?” the mother demanded, not recognizing how close she was to having to call the insurance company for compensation on a house fire.

“Give my brother his toy back now.” Robbie couldn't keep the growl out of his voice. He gripped the edge of the table, anchoring himself.

“Shelly,” said the father again. “Gabriel is not your child.”

“Fine,” the mother said. She set Mr. Fuji down in front of Gabe. Gabe offered it back over the table toward Ann. Robbie sat down, stopped himself from using Eli's muscle memory to twirl his table knife.

“Thanks,” Ann said. “Who's this guy?”

Gabriel launched into a panel-by-panel account of how Mr. Fuji found a young werewolf half-frozen outside a monastery, nursed him back to health, and showed him the Way of the Ninja. He got out Ninja Wolf and used salt shakers and the bowl of cilantro as stand-ins for extra characters. This distracted Shelly from further prying; instead she kept shooting incredulous glances over his head at Robbie, as if to say, _Really? These are the table manners you've instilled in this boy?_

To which Robbie raised his eyebrow as if to say, _You wanna complain to his legal guardian?_

 **Smug, self-righteous cow.** Eli broke his long silence. **So soft and naive. So arrogant. The implications about your brother...the pity, the contempt—**

 _You make implications about Gabe all the time,_ Robbie thought back, taking a determined bite of his fajita. _On purpose. And you mean them._

**But that's me. You can't hurt me.**

_It's been so long since you tried to convince me to murder someone I almost thought you left,_ Robbie replied, chewing.

**Left? Never. You see how she's looking at him? It's like she thinks he's diseased.**

_I don't think you had this concept in the Nineties,_ Robbie continued, _but here in the twenty-first century, the many, many nicknames you have for Gabe are all 'ableist slurs.' I hear these terms from you, in my mind, every goddamn day. I got used to it. You are not going to persuade me to gut Lisa's mother. So back off, and let this dinner be a bit less hellish. Got it?_

**Don't take that tone with me, you little shit.**

_Or what? You'll leave? Find a new host? If you can even do that anymore, I'll gladly take you shopping._

_You can't, can you._

Radio silence again. Robbie finally finished chewing, and had a sip of water.

Eli hijacked the muscles of his throat and Robbie bent down in a coughing fit when it went down the wrong pipe.

_I'm sorry. Did I hurt your feeling._

They finished dinner. Somehow. Gabe did most of the rest of the talking, because Ann turned out to be a sucker for idealistic yet tortured werewolf ninjas and kept asking him questions. Either that, or she wanted to irritate her mother. Gabe was overjoyed for a fresh audience. When he didn't know how to answer one of Ann's questions, he'd say, “I didn't understand,” or “I don't know,” with an openness Ann seemed to like. After dinner, Gabe demanded to do the dishes. He and Robbie usually did them together, and once upon a time, drying a pot had been a lot of physical activity for him. Now he was bigger, steadier. But as Robbie looked around at the array of glasses and plates and dinnerware and serving platters, he was concerned Gabe might have bitten off more than he could chew. He was on the edge of nudging Gabe to sit them out, when he noticed Shelly eyeing her glassware with an alarmed expression.

_**Bitch.** _

“Great idea. I'll get your chair so you can have your hands free, okay, buddy?” He stood and headed through the kitchen toward the front door.

“Stop!”

Robbie stopped in his tracks and spun. Gabe sounded panicked. “What? What's wrong?”

“I want to go with you.”

Robbie returned, scooted Gabe's chair away from the table, and helped him into his crutches. “I'm just gonna be a minute. You know I'm coming back?”

“I know.” Still, Gabe followed him out the door, down the low steps of the front porch, and over to the car where Robbie had stored the power chair, watching him the entire time. Robbie lugged the chair into the house and set it down as gently as he could, nearly over-balancing.

**Jesus. If it weren't for me, you'd destroy your spine by age thirty.**

Gabe backed up to the chair and pushed himself into it with his arms, hung the crutches on their hook. “Thank-you, Robbie.”

“You're welcome, Gabe.”

Shelly spoke up as Robbie started to clear the table, one place setting at a time. “You don't have to do this, you know. You're a guest.”

“Dishes! Dishes!” Gabe yelled, banging on the chair's arms.

Robbie gave her an impudent shrug and carried on. Ann and Lisa stepped up to help clear the table, and Clyde stood and disappeared elsewhere into the house. Robbie got one half of the sink plugged and started filling it with soapy water. Gabe grabbed a dishtowel off the oven and shook it up and down.

“We've got a dishwasher,” Lisa said.

“Oh.” Robbie let the drain out.

Ann opened the big black dishwasher under the counter next to the sink. “We're supposed to rinse the food off, otherwise it sticks on all the glasses.”

“How's a dishwasher work?” Gabe asked Robbie.

“I don't know,” Robbie said.

Ann stepped in. “There's a spinny thing on the bottom, basically a sprinkler that sprays hot water. You add soap, too. It rinses and dries everything for you, but it's not that good at getting rid of food bits. It's kinda cheap.”

“Cool!” Gabe exclaimed. Robbie rinsed and passed the dishes to Gabe, and Ann pointed out which rack everything went in.

Lisa leaned over the sink as Robbie worked. “Oh my god, I am so embarrassed. Are you guys okay? Mom kinda gave you the third degree back there.”

“It's fine,” Robbie said. “I mean, she must think we're dating.”

Lisa turned away suddenly. “Oh. Right.” Her voice went dull.

“You told me you just wanted to be friends.”

“Mmhm.”

“I can't date you. I can't date anyone. I've got...stuff.”

“Mm.”

“I mean. If I could date, I'd probably want to date you.”

“Probably.”

“Yeah. You're beautiful. You get good grades. Gabe likes you. You're nice.”

“Guess I meet all your qualifications.”

Robbie nodded, rinsing sour cream off a plate.

“You're just not hiring right now.”

 _I have an old man sharing my brain who either still thinks girls have cooties or only gets off on their butchered organs._ “Lisa, you know it's not like that. You said you wanted to be friends, right? Well, I'm going through some stuff and I could really use a friend. Okay?”

“Whatever.”

“Great.” He finished scraping the last dish and passed it down to Gabe, who buzzed his chair around the open dishwasher drawer to find an open spot to put it.

“Twenty-nine dishes!” Gabe exclaimed. “That was a lot of dishes!”

“Sure was. I've never washed that many dishes before.”

“Me, neither! Ann, make the dishwasher turn on! Please!”

Lisa touched Robbie on the arm. “I'm sorry, I'm being a twit. I promise tomorrow I can be mature about this.”

**She's just stunned and appalled that anyone might not want her.**

As Robbie watched, she buttoned up her distress and reconstructed her confident, welcoming everyday smile. “How about we start on those cookies so they're cooled off in time for dessert?”

“So fake,” Ann muttered, pouring detergent into its little cavity in the door.

“Oh! I planned to take them to work,” Robbie said.

“What?” Ann demanded, shutting the dishwasher.

“Oh?” Lisa said.

“Yeah.” Robbie scratched the back of his neck. “There's a guy at work I don't get along with. He, uh, he yelled at—anyway, Canelo thinks I can't get along with him. So he's not giving me any shifts Ramón's working, and now even though I'm out of school, I'm still not on day shift. If I went day shift, I could go full-time. Save up enough to get through trade school. But first I need to convince Canelo that I don't have beef with Ramón anymore.”

“These are work cookies.”

“I can pay you for the ingredients. I just needed the recipe—”

“Oh, my god! I can't even with you right now.” **Self-absorbed Jezebel.** “It's on your phone, be my guest.” And she stomped out.

“Walk nicely!” Shelly yelled from outside on the patio.

Robbie looked around the kitchen in confusion. He got his phone out, looked at a list of ingredients. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Grease a cookie sheet. Cream together butter and sugar.

“Why is Lisa mad at us?” Gabe asked.

“I think I hurt her feelings by accident,” Robbie said. One half teaspoon of vanilla extract. One quarter teaspoon baking powder, one half teaspoon baking soda. What were these substances? Usually Robbie just dumped cans in a pot and added this and that until it tasted good. This looked much more technical.

“We should say sorry.”

Robbie shut his eyes hard. “You're right, buddy. I'll tell her I'm sorry when she comes back.”

“You need a hand?” Ann asked with an amused expression. “If we double the batch and keep a dozen cookies, I'll help.”

“Done. Where's a cookie sheet?”

Ann dragged out canisters and boxes and bags and scoops and spatulas and a twenty-pound stand mixer whose motor might well serve as a starter for a small family sedan. Robbie watched in awe and a little worry as it smashed an entire stick of cold butter under its steel paddle, buzzing and thumping with each rotation. “Cup of sugar. No, not that one— _one_ cup of sugar. That's a half cup. Good, while that's creaming, you mix the dry ingredients in a separate bowl, it blends better that way. No, don't pack the flour—you've got to fluff it. Nice and light. Then scrape off the top with this table knife. God, you make this look difficult. No, that's a tablespoon! That's way too much salt! T-S-P means teaspoon. This one. Baking powder, baking soda—don't mix these up. Okay, I got the wet ingredients ready, see?” The mixer's capacious bowl was coated in hills and valleys of grainy tan goo. “Now we add the dry ingredients—oh my god, not that fast! Now the mixer's gonna throw flour all over!” Annie covered the entire stand mixer with a dishtowel before turning it on to its lowest setting. “Okay, just a little bit at a time now.” The cookie dough took shape, from a gritty ooze of butter, sugar, and eggs to a greasy, sticky, off-white paste. “Now's the best part. Get the Craisins and the white chocolate chips. One last stir and we're ready to load the cookie sheets.”

“This is way more complicated than I expected.”

“I can see that.”

“I don't think I even have real teaspoons.”

“Wait, you guys live alone, right? What do you eat?”

“Simple stuff.”

“Robbie makes chili dogs, and mac-and-cheese, and noodles, and peas, and tacos, and hot dogs, and carrots, and chicken soup, and alphabet soup, and potato soup. It's all really tasty!”

“Thanks, Gabe,” Robbie said, feeling better about his skills to have them listed out like that.

“I dunno, I never cook any of that stuff. Browning the onions and stuff like that. Baking is simple, you just follow the recipe.”

“If you say so.”

Ann got out a special device from a drawer, a hemispherical scoop with two spring-loaded handles that moved a tiny semicircular sweeper arm back and forth inside. She used it to scoop out balls of Craisin-and-white-chocolate-studded dough and squeezed the handles to drop them on the cookie sheet. “Here.”

Robbie followed her example, dropping dough balls onto the sheet in neat rows.

“No, you need more space than that. They'll spread out. Give them at least two inches.”

“Robbie, can I try?”

“Sure.” He passed Gabe the cookie baller and Gabe squeezed the handles experimentally, watching the sweeper arm scrape residual dough back and forth inside the scoop. Just two years ago he wouldn't have had the grip strength to operate it.

They got two cookie sheets loaded and in the oven to bake for ten minutes. There was still plenty of dough left over, and Ann produced a third cookie sheet to fill before they ran out.

“Dishes!” Gabe announced.

Ann grinned at him, snorting. “We can just put them in the sink until the dishwasher's done.”

“Dishes! Dishes!”

“You like doing the dishes, don't you.”

“I love doing dishes with Robbie!”

Ann put the ingredients back while Robbie ran a sink full of soapy water and washed up the measuring spoons and mixing bowls. Gabe dried them and set them on the counter for Ann to put away.

Lisa re-emerged from beyond the hallway, looking somehow different. Robbie wasn't sure what it was, and he stared for an awkward moment before he realized that she had wiped off her eye makeup, taken off her false eyelashes, and applied a different, simpler design. If he hadn't watched Nora do it so often in the passenger seat, it would never have occurred to him. Her face looked a little puffy. “Oh,” she said, disappointed. “You're all done.”

“You're such an immature bitch, Lisa,” Ann said. “This guy's been nothing but nice, and you're mad 'cause you got friendzoned. And isn't Gabe that kid you lost at the pharmacy this summer?”

Lisa clutched her hands in front of her mouth and her eyes went wide.

“Pharmacy?” Robbie asked, calm.

“Oops?” Ann said.

“You called me at ten PM. What were you doing at the pharmacy that late at night?”

“Robbie-Robbie, don't be mad! Are you mad?”

“Gabe, I need to talk to Lisa. How many hours was he missing before you called me?” He felt dizzy, sick. His fingers felt numb. His blood was pounding, and his eyes grew hot.

“Robbie, don't be mad at Lisa! I ran away! I listened to Conscience and it's my fault! Don't be mad!”

Lisa started to blink and sniffle, still pressing her mouth hard into her hands.

**She's no good, kid. She's a flake. Always has been, always will be. Negligent. Dangerous. And too stupid to walk away after she knows she's stepped in it. And she thinks you're stupid, too.**

Robbie flashed back to that night they'd spent scouring East LA looking for Gabe after she'd called him. How many wasted opportunities. How much could have gone wrong.

Gabe buzzed over and tugged at Robbie's jacket. “Robbie, don't be mad! Lisa's our friend!”

“I need to take a drive,” Robbie said.

Lisa reached for him. “Robbie—”

“I'm going to forgive you,” Robbie said, his voice flat. “But I need to take a drive. Go ahead and put on a movie. I'll be back.” The air in front of his face rippled with the heat of his breath.

Gabe reached up and grabbed Robbie's arm. “No, Robbie, don't go.”

“I'll come back, I promise.”

“Don't go.” Gabe was starting to cry. Robbie almost couldn't take it. But if he stayed here a minute longer, he really couldn't take it—the rage was building too sharply.

“I _have_ to go,” he said, kneeling down. “I'll come back. I promise I'll come back. But I gotta go for a drive, buddy. I can't stay. I have to.” He hated himself as he pried Gabe's fingers loose from his jacket, as Gabe folded in on himself with a muffled wail. “I'll come back.”

He fairly fled out the door. Flung himself into the Charger and floored it, the nose rising a foot in the air, the blower screaming over the rumble of the engine.

**That's the ticket. Who's it gonna be? Those gang-bangers always hanging around 60 th and Pine this time a'night? Maybe some Russians?**

_Pink Shorts. I marked him._

**Proactive, I like it.**

As they left Lisa's neighborhood, they burned up and screamed toward a freeway on-ramp, shooting sparks and fire and terrifying passers-by.

_Port me to him._

The Rider melted into the car and re-emerged in a dark room full of shelves, bits of plastic bag and the charred wreckage of a cardboard box fluttering around his feet.

_**What the?** _

He looked up. An industrial light bulb hung from the ceiling, and as he watched, it turned on and cast harsh shadows. All around him were racks and racks of shelves and cardboard boxes, sealed with real tamper-evident tape. Inside the box the Rider had destroyed were pieces of clothing: deck shoes. Polo shirt. Pinstriped cotton shorts. The belt that Robbie had bled on. All the clothing was destroyed, and not by the Rider: cut down the middle and along each limb with scissors, and frayed, punctured, and stained with blood and dirt.

Someone had beat the shit out of Pink Shorts. Someone had stolen his mark.

Pink Shorts had lived at least long enough for EMTs to cut him out of his clothes. His wallet was in a separate sealed envelope, and the Rider ripped it open and pulled out his driver license. Memorized the name.

“Stop! Hands above your head, stay where you are!”

A cop, pointing a handgun at the Rider from the entrance to the room.

“ _ **Hyiiiiirh,**_ ” the Rider growled, and fell through the floor back into the Car.

**Well that was pointless. We shoulda stuck around and looked for drug money; that was an evidence lockup. Who do you think beat us to the punch?**

_I think that was Nora. She said she still had a superpill._

**If she killed him, does that make her a murderer?**

_Fuck off, Eli._

**Well, we gotta do something. You're all tanked up. How about you find him and finish the job?**

_Ghost Rider isn't gonna be seen murdering people in hospital beds._

**Right, right. We need to get ourselves a rifle.**

**60 th and Pine? **

_Sure._

They ported to 60 th  and Pine, where there were usually a few enforcers, lookouts, and runners for a local heroin dealer lurking around, but tonight there was no one. They roared around and around the block, even ported the Rider onto the top of a condemned apartment building, but all they found inside were homeless people trying to sleep. The Rider snarled in frustration as people screamed and backed against the walls. He dove out the window and into the car.

_Take us to the desert._

**What a fuckin' cop-out.**

_We're almost ready for Northwick. I'm not gonna break somebody's legs just because they happened to be here and I'm too pissed off to control myself._

They ported away, deep in an uninhabited area of the Sonora Desert. Picked a boulder and rammed into it again and again, the Rider melting out of the car to pound it with fists and hammers, until all that was left of the ancient wind formation was gray rubble. Some geologist was going to have a coronary.

Their rage was not satisfied, but they were both tired, when they ported back and snuffed out almost an hour later. Robbie patted himself to be sure he'd changed all the way back. They parked the car in Lisa's driveway and Robbie knocked on the door, feverish and stinking of brimstone and exhaust fumes.

Gabe opened the door before he'd had a chance to lower his hand. It only opened a few inches, because Gabe had parked the power chair in front of it, blocking the doorway with over a hundred and fifty pounds of total weight. Action music played from the darkened living room, and colorful lights reflected on the wall. “Robbie?” Gabe asked.

“Hey, buddy. Whatcha doing in front of the door?”

Shelly appeared over his shoulder. “Your brother has psychological issues. He cried when you left, he's ignoring the movie, and he refused to leave the door. He threatened to bite me and he screamed when I moved his chair, and then he went right back to blocking the door! You need to talk to him. He probably needs medication.”

“Thank-you for your input, ma'am,” Robbie said through gritted teeth. “Gabe. Buddy. I'm back. Why are you doing this, what's going on?”

“Robbie-Robbie?”

“It's me. I came back. I told you I'd come back, right? I promised.”

Gabe stared at him through the gap in the door. Robbie leaned on the wall, then collapsed to his knees. He reached through the gap and Gabe took his hand.

“Please let me in, buddy.”

“Don't go.”

“I won't. Not 'till after you go to bed, all right? I gotta drive people in my car, but I won't go before that.”

“I don't want you to go.”

“I'm sorry, buddy. I have to. But not right now. Okay?”

“Okay, Robbie,” Gabe said. He backed the chair away from the door.

Robbie heaved himself to his feet. “Can I hug you?”

Gabe nodded. Robbie supported himself on the chair arm as he leaned down, pressed his chin behind Gabe's bony shoulders, felt his brother grip the back of his neck as if to hang there. When they let go, Robbie went to the kitchen and drank out of the faucet.

“Come eat your one cookie,” Ann called from the living room couch. She had her phone out, and was browsing the Internet and watching the movie at the same time. Lisa was nowhere to be seen.

“Gabe can have it,” Robbie said. He needed something lighter. “Do you have any Gatorade?”

“We've got powdered. I'll show you.” Ann dug a big canister out from a cupboard and helped him mix up a glass of gritty pink sports drink. Robbie returned to the living room, stirring it with a spoon and sipping impatiently. It tasted off, probably because half the sugar was still undissolved in the bottom. “Did you puke or something? Are you okay?”

“I'm fine.” He helped Gabe onto the couch and handed him the single cookie they'd been saving for him, on a plate on the coffee table. The movie was a CG cartoon, with a tropical island and a family in matching red jumpsuits. “What movie is this?”

“ _The Incredibles._ You've never seen _Incredibles?_ It's the best superhero movie ever made.”

 _Great._ “I don't see a lot of movies.” They watched the family battle a self-absorbed supervillain in a black and white jumpsuit, who was a needier and more self-righteous style of asshole than Eli. Everyone in the family had powers, but they were just physical. None of them were supposed to be dead. Their abilities were wholly their own, no strings attached but the need for secrecy. Mr. and Mrs. Incredible were right there watching out for their kids, feeding them, telling them what to do, trying to keep them safe, telling them right from wrong. They didn't have some crazy long-lost uncle lurking in the alley around the school trying to press guns and knives into the kids' hands, no deranged voices in their heads urging them to murder. They lived in a nice house in the suburbs. They probably had a comprehensive family medical insurance plan with a low deductible.

When they finished the movie, Robbie canvassed the living and dining room for Gabe's toys and magazines, and carefully packed two dozen freshly cooled cookies into a gallon storage bag. “Thanks for your help, Ann,” he said. “Tell your sister...uh...”

“Oh, there's no way she's gonna talk to me for weeks,” Ann said. “Tell her yourself.”

“Yeah.”

“Bye, Gabe.”

“Bye, Ann.” Louder, Gabe called, “Bye, Lisa!”

They drove home. “Did you really try to bite Lisa's mom?” Robbie asked as he set out Gabe's evening meds on the bathroom counter.

Gabe looked away. “I didn't do it.”

“But you made her think you would?”

“I had to keep the door shut. So Uncle Eli can't get in.”

 _Oh. Oh, no, no, no._ “No, Gabe. It's _my_ job to keep Eli—to control him. That's for me to worry about, not you. I don't want you putting yourself in his way. I don't want you getting—I don't want him to think—it's not your job, Gabe.”

**I woulda gone through the window.**

“But you can't all the time!” Gabe protested. “Sometimes you can't get up.”

“We have a deal. He's not supposed to hurt people,” without Robbie's permission. “He's especially not supposed to hurt you.”

“He lies!”

“Well, if he lies to me he's going to be in big trouble, okay? Gabe, please. Please. If you're scared. If you think Eli's doing something I wouldn't let him do, I don't want you to get in his way. I want you to run.”

“Heroes don't run!” Gabe yelled. “Heroes save people! I can do lotsa stuff now, I can be a hero! Heroes don't let their friends get hurt!”

“Being a hero is dangerous and stupid!” Robbie snapped back. “No. No, Gabe. I'm sorry I said that. Heroes get hurt and I don't want you to get hurt. I want you to be safe. I love you so much.”

“I love you, too, Robbie.” Gabe sniffled. “I don't want you to go away.”

“I have to go drive people in the car, I told you.”

“No. I don't want Uncle Eli to make you go away.”

“He can't,” Robbie said. “I'm stronger than him. Okay?” **You keep telling yourself that.** “I _am._ He can't make me go away for long. And I'm getting stronger. So stopping him isn't your job, it's mine. And I—I don't think I could fight him if something happened to you. I'd be so sad. I _need_ you to stay safe. Please.”

Gabe started to cry again, and Robbie leaned against his chair and pulled him against his chest.

Gabe went to bed exhausted and later than usual. Robbie caught a half-hour catnap and turned on the Uber app, waited for partying pax to start pinging.

It turned out to be a midling-decent Friday night. Lots of men traveling from bars to the local strip club and back—Robbie got a bad feeling from some of these men and Eli kept suggesting them for targets, but the bouncer at the Rhino tipped him a twenty every time he brought two or more passengers. Lots of people heading to clubs in nicer parts of the city, and once he got into the more gentrified areas, lots of bar-hoppers. He cruised around and around. Stopped every now and then to take a fifteen minute nap.

After midnight, he picked up a lone white girl from REBIRTH, the dance club where Ramón Cordova had rescued that teenager, Anita. She was messed up on something, but not panicking like Anita had been. She was headed home to Whittier. She had long dun-colored hair that fell in a tangled mess over her shoulders, and was wearing a simple green dress that fell to her knees. She didn’t look like the usual type Robbie picked up at the clubs: an amateur, he guessed. He hoped she didn’t have too much of a headache in the morning from whatever she took.

“Your car is so beautiful,” she said for the fourth time as they cruised through the city. “Can I roll the window down?”

“Yeah, go ahead.” She had trouble operating the hand-crank, her coordination all shot, so Robbie reached over with his mind and did it for her. She stuck her hand out like a fin and let it rise and fall on the wind as they traveled. “Hey, is it okay if we go somewhere else?”

“Where to?”

“Just—around. Just drive around.”

“Yeah, okay. You know you’ll get charged, right?”

“I know.”

Robbie took a detour onto the freeway. The closest place to joyride in the middle of the night happened to be Turnbull Canyon, where Eli used to dump bodies and they’d started a small forest fire that had drawn in water-bombers a couple weeks back when they fought their second New York supervillain.

“Whoo!” the pax exclaimed as they accelerated up the onramp and the blower started to scream. The whole front end rose with the thrust. “I love your car!”

“Me too,” Robbie said honestly. He gave her a good ride over the freeway, punching the accelerator to pass but trying not to stay too long past five miles over the speed limit. At Turnbull Canyon, they hit the winding road through the hills and took the curves hard, the engine roaring, the blower whistling and shrieking as Robbie shifted through the turns. The pax laughed the whole way. “You good to go home?” he asked when they reached the end of the park, back into the built-up part of the city.

“Yeah,” she sighed. “Your car is so beautiful.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“Thanks for driving me around,” she continued.

“No problem.”

“It made me really happy.”

Robbie nodded, a little bashful. He loved to drive. He loved the engineering artistry that went into this muscle car, from the design that had rolled off a Detroit assembly line so long ago, to the after-market modifications that modernized it and allowed it to outperform conventional vehicles. It was far from a hardship to drive fifteen miles out of his way, with the meter running, to put the car through its paces while his pax cheered him on and reminded him why he loved to drive so much.

“You’re a good person,” she said with sudden intensity. “I met so many good people tonight, I didn’t think there were so many. There’s so much good in people. You just can’t always see it, you know? Like when you don’t brush your teeth. But it’s still there, underneath.”

_Eli, I don’t want to hear it._

**Hear what?**

“Let’s get you home,” Robbie said, and they headed through Whittier to a house in a quiet suburb where all the lights are on.

“They’re worried about me,” the pax said as she got out. “But I don’t have to be scared of anything now.”

 **She’s dying,** Eli said as they drove away toward a surge pricing zone.

“What? Why?”

**People love to talk philosophical bullshit when they're dying.**

Robbie felt a pang of distress, and stuffed it down. She’d paid him. She’d gotten home safe. “At least she had a nice night.”

At five fifteen in the morning, he ghosted up again, and ported from the car halfway across the city to the tree on the hill overlooking La Tuna Canyon Road. He snuffed out and settled in behind a bush, watching the road below. At five forty-two, he heard the whine of the lime-green Lotus as it carved through the turns. He pulled out his phone, set to airplane mode, and activated a stopwatch app. He timed the Lotus as it passed two safety flashers five hundred feet apart. When it disappeared, he ghosted up again, melted into the car through the shadow of the tree, snuffed out, and drove home.

 

* * *

 

Robbie brought the cookies to Canelo's on Monday. Ramón Cordova worked Mondays; Robbie didn't. When Robbie showed up with the bag of cookies dangling from one fist, blinking sleep out of his eyes, Marty rolled himself out from under a Toyota Tundra and wiped his meaty hands on his shop towel. “Robbie! Que pasa, guey? Haven't seen you around in like two weeks!”

“Wrong shifts,” Robbie said. “I brought cookies.”

Marty grabbed the bag. “Cool. What are these, cherries?”

“Cranberries.”

“Your girlfriend make these?”

“Sure. Hey, could you leave those in the staff room? They're for everyone, but I wanted to thank Mr. Cordova for those tamales a couple weeks back.”

“He's in the can, stick around and you can tell him yourself.”

“Pass.”

Marty took out a cookie and stuck the entire thing in his mouth. “Hey, these are pretty good.”

“Leave a few for the rest of the guys.”

“Little stale, though.”

“Sorry.”

He called the local mental health coordinator about anger management counseling. “Sure, we got a few slots open. Wednesday at six pm, Friday at nine am, Saturday at noon.”

“Friday, please.”

“All right. Be sure to have your court order with you—”

“I don't have a court order.”

A pause. “You don't?”

“No.”

“Then why're you trying to get into anger management?”

“Because I need help managing my anger,” Robbie bit out.

“It can't be that bad if you're looking for help voluntarily. Try a counselor.”

Robbie had looked in to private counseling. Almost all the counselors in his area specialized in substance abuse. Besides, he couldn't afford the co-pay. No way, with the rent, the gas, Gabe's bi-monthly pharmacy charges, and saving up for the GED testing fee he needed soon. “Please. I—low income.” He hated that phrase. He was working as hard as hard as he could, without selling his services to the mob and turning into his uncle for real.

“I don't know. Try some churches and community centers. See if they have any support groups.”

Thwarted, he hung up. He checked his checking account, went to the pharmacy, and picked up Gabe’s medications without having to add to his Care Credit balance. Then he took a melatonin and a Benadryl and went to bed. Woke up to his alarm at five pm. Picked up Gabe from the Development Center. Splurged on ice cream and the latest _Grouper Toad_ trade with the surplus left over from paying the pharmacy. Made soup. Ate while Gabe read _Grouper Toad_ and re-enacted the best bits over his soup bowl. Put Gabe to bed, brushed his teeth, sniffed his pits, changed, turned on Uber, and cruised for more fares.

Mondays weren’t a big night for late fares, so he took some time to mark off a short driving course in an empty parking lot with a pair of cardboard boxes. While he waited for a ping, he practiced his slides and hand-brake turns.

The hand-brake turn was a finicky maneuver, but not too hard to master if you were willing to scrape some rubber off the tires. Get up to speed, throw the wheel hard, yank the parking brake to lock up the rear wheels until they skid. Release the parking brake when the back of the car flips around the front wheels 180 degrees. Slam the shifter into first and take off.

To skid sideways, that was slightly different. Much more finicky. Start the turn, but the moment the rear tires kick around 90 degrees, jerk the wheel so the front tires go perpendicular to the direction of the car’s momentum, so they were forced to skid, too. Keep those fronts skidding so as not to drift backward, forward, or into an unplanned rotation. Come to a violent stop crossways to the starting direction, or kick the wheel around to regain traction and finish in a full 180 degree turn, if there was still enough momentum.

At nearly four thousand pounds, the Hell Charger had a lot of momentum to use.

The handbrake turn was one of the first skills a teenage gearhead learned after getting unsupervised access to any vehicle without automated traction control, and Robbie's turns were pretty good. That sideways drift, though, that needed polishing. Eli wasn't much help here. Eli had never had to run down a target in a British supercar.

La Tuna Canyon Road was 40 feet wide at its narrowest point. The Charger was 17 feet long, maybe 18 feet on the diagonal. A 2005 Lotus could corner like a cat and stop dead inside 160 feet from 75 miles an hour. If Northwick wanted to run, he could flog the Lotus from that dead stop to one hundred miles an hour in 13.1 seconds, and top out at 138 miles an hour. The Charger could overtake it—even without black magic, its seven liter supercharged V-8 could match the Lotus's 1.8 liter 4-cylinder no matter how light its aluminum chassis was—but it was that maneuverability that was giving them trouble. The Charger was an unwieldy beast.

Also giving them trouble was the abysmal—or, rather, non-existent—safety data on the Lotus Elise. The only crash tests ever done on the things were a Discovery Channel special (a 30 mph head-on collision with a wall may be survivable) and various anecdotes and photos scattered around the Internet (cuts, concussions, and very, very many Lotuses crushed like soda cans from wedging themselves under any vehicle with a bumper two feet off the ground). They would have to crash into the Lotus—but gently. Head-on—it only had airbags on the front. And not at Northwick's habitual pace of 75 miles an hour through La Tuna Canyon: they had to be moving in his same direction of travel. They couldn't force Northwick straight into a barrier or a hill. Northwick would not survive that.

He didn't technically have to survive, of course. Robbie had agreed that he and Eli would live, and kill, as long as they only killed people Robbie approved of, and Alex Northwick was the first person they'd met in six months who had made the cut. But before they killed him, Robbie wanted him to _understand._

Alex Northwick had killed Candace Gutierrez. Not for money, desperation, self-defense, or to prove a point, but simply because he could. Because she was there. And she had been there for him to kill, because she had loved him. He had made her suffer all the years she spent in his power, and if this story went as the stories usually did, he'd killed her when she tried to escape. Alex Northwick had murdered an innocent person, for no reason.

Robbie had been reading and re-reading Candace's senior project from the website of her college's School of Graphic Design. The clean, elegant scenes composed with an artist's sensitivity and a draftsman's precision. In her paper, she'd discussed the principle of positive behavior modeling: people imitate what they see, even unconsciously. Hence her illustration for fireworks safety: four people standing in a concrete driveway, two children restrained a safe distance away by a kneeling man, a woman in a wheelchair beside them, and another woman holding a long barbecue lighter to the fuse of a bottle rocket, a bucket of water waiting nearby in case of accidents. Her diagram for beach-side safety: a rip-tide, sharks, sharp rocks, and surf, and a family happily playing in a quiet and netted-off area. Her sequence of panels for crossing the street: look right, wait for a car, left, another car, right, a third car, and then the road was clear and the child crossed. While Alex had made his career in patching up people torn apart by accidents and violence, Candace's interest had been in preventing those accidents in the first place. Who was the Sheriff's Department to overlook Candace's death because of Alex's job? How could anyone value one life over another?

Robbie carved turn after turn over the parking lot, the engine snarling and the blower hissing and shrieking as it revved, spinning the overpowered machine back and forth between the cardboard boxes until his arms ached from hauling against the steering wheel and the tarmac grew slick in spots with streaks of rubber. Sometimes he was the still point within the car that the world rotated around. Sometimes the shock of their spinning and stopping flung him from side to side in his seat. He had to gun the motor just so, reach thirty miles an hour in the shortest distance possible, then kick the car around 90 degrees and keep going straight—or jig forward or backward at will, still skidding. The Charger wasn't meant for this: even with Eli's modifications from the nineties, the re-worked suspension and disc brakes, it was an unwieldy monster built only for speed on the straight-away. Robbie had to keep all his senses alert, to pick up what went wrong every time he lost control, every time he swung too short or too wide, drifted too far forward or back. He could feel the strain in every point of the car: the yaw of the suspension, the creak of the axles and wheel bearings, the burn and scrape of the tires losing rubber. He had to be perfect. The sooner he mastered the sideways slide, the sooner they could grab Northwick and the sooner this nightmare could be over—until Eli needed him to kill again.

He had an audience—a couple boys creeping closer from a 7-11, drawn to the acrid smoke and the cacophonous shrieks and growls of the revving engine and the blower and the skidding tires. Whatever. No reason they couldn't watch.

He got a ping. “Antonio,” 4.7 stars, waiting at the strip club. He drove off.

He missed Nora.

 

* * *

 

In the week and a half it took to master the stunts he needed to do in the Charger, Robbie scraped a hundred and fifty dollars together without denting his nascent emergency fund, and blew it all on the registration fee for an upcoming GED test session. He usually felt so reckless when he spent money on himself. Now, it was just another tick on the clock, marking time until he went after Northwick.

He and Eli began to wait for Northwick in earnest.

Uber nights, he would head for the Flintridge and Sun Valley areas, closer to the sparsely-settled island of hills where Northwick lived. Just before dawn, he would head down La Tuna Canyon Road and park at the gravel trailhead facing out, where passing cars wouldn't notice a vintage muscle car with a chromed blower. He would ghost up just long enough to port up to the viewpoint he'd picked on the hill, where he could see the entire road, all its bends, all the way to the freeway. And then they would wait. Watch for a lime-green Lotus Elise to pass by, heading East, with no vehicles approaching from either direction.

The first morning they set up to wait, Robbie was shaking like a tweaker, foot bouncing up and down. He had to get up to pee three times.

**Better nut up, kid, if we get a shot tonight I'm not lettin' him get away 'cause you're shy.**

_I'm not shy. You're psychotic._

**That's no way to speak to your Tio Elias.**

Robbie watched the road below him. He could just make out the colors and contours of the cars as they passed in the twilight: a dark blue or black SUV, heading West. A small red pick-up truck, heading East. A compact 2010's silver sedan.

**I remember _my_ first kill—**

_Please don't._

**My first paid kill, then. Hell, what am I saying, this isn't your first kill. Just your first _premeditated_ kill. Think about it this way: we've done all the preparation and planning we need to pull this off. The chances of us fucking up now are substantially lower than when you're panicked and a Russian's holding a gun to Gabbie's head. And that worked out A-okay for everyone—except Yegor Ivanov, who even now burns in Hell.**

_I didn't mean to do that._

**Do you regret it?**

_No._

**See? Not that bad.**

_Eli. Can you—just answer one question, and don't bullshit me. Why do we need this? Why do we have to kill?_

**You mean why do _you_ have to kill. **

**Two reasons. You promised. And we're one and the same. It's your nature, because it's my nature.**

_Can't you just get a normal fucking hobby?_

**Oh, like street-rodding? I got hobbies, I'm very well-rounded.**

**Killing's not a _hobby,_ you sanctimonious little shit. It's—it's important. It's—**

**Ever since I was a kid—**

_Oh, don't complain to **me** about your 'rough childhood,' _Robbie sneered.

**Shut up. Ever since I was a kid I knew I was different. Everyone else had these scripts they would follow, invisible boxes. Whoever the role model du jour happened to be, Grandpa, the guy selling baggies behind the bowling alley, whoever—all the kids needed to please them, earn their approval, earn their peers' approval. Accumulate friends. God, how they worried. They just molded themselves around each-other like sticky-buns. But not me, I was teflon. I changed for nobody and nothing. I didn't see their boxes. It gave me an edge. Your father admired that about me, back then, when he used to have my back. Said I was a great problem-solver, saw things a different way.**

**Anyone's a great problem-solver when everyone else spends their whole life pulled by the short hairs and hobbled by their own guilt. It's everyone else who's defective.**

_Forget I asked._

**No. You did ask. Kid—**

**You know what separates us from the animals? Other than speech, writing, featherless-biped bullshit? What separates us from the animals is that we cook our food. We make clothes. We drive cars. We carry knives. We _make ourselves into whatever our environment demands._ You think it's natural for something like you to live off of, what the fuck you eat, smashed up bits of grass seed? Boiled roots and leaves if you're feeling your Julia Child this week? No. People talk human nature, people talk normality, well, no-one's seen a _normal human_ since before recorded human history. People got no clue what we actually are. **

**We deny our needs, we substitute other needs, we survive on, fuckin', root vegetables and pink slime. And for thousands and thousands of years, our environment, civilization, demands that we _domesticate_ ourselves, that we be _tame,_ that we swap out our true desires for emasculated substitutes, barely enough to subsist on. Like sex, and boxing. **

**Killing is the real deal. It's important, it's the most important—you look down at another human being, you see the last spark of life leave their eyes, feel them give that last twitch, their whole future winking out under your hands, you are their _god_ , and you _own_ them. Forever. Nothing can undo that. **

_So you kill people because you're lonely._

_...That's pathetic._

**Excuse me. Excuse me for verbalizing the deepest innermost desires of your soul.**

_I don't want to kill anyone—_

_**Everyone** _ **wants to kill! They just walk around with their balls in a noose so they don't feel it! Remember Yegor Ivanov. We were almost one being when we killed him, my revenge, your rage, I know you felt it then. You're just in denial because you're afraid. But it's natural. The most natural thing in the world, it's the real human nature.**

**And it's fun. And they deserve it. And I _can,_ and I _need to._ **

**So that's why I kill. But what you want to know is why do _you_ have to kill, and that's simple. You promised, and if you don't kill scumbags on purpose, you'll kill your brother on accident. **

**...Oh, look, there he goes.**

A green Lotus Elise whirred by below, tailgating and then rapidly passing a Prius in a no-passing zone. A witness. They needed the road to be empty.

Robbie ghosted up and melted back into the car, put it in gear, and drove off toward an out-of-the-way spot they were using to portal home from—a dark street under an old, shorting-out power transformer that would camouflage Ghost Rider's EMF signature. _We'll try again Saturday morning._

**No hurry. He's not suspicious, got a stable job. We can wait for the right time.**

 

* * *

 

The right time didn't come the next night, or the night after that. Staking out La Tuna Canyon became a tedious routine—except for the week Alex vanished, not passing by in the a.m. or the pm, no Facebook updates, nothing, only to return to the Internet suddenly with new pictures of dead elk. **A hunting trip. He can't give a little warning? That woulda been the perfect time to disappear him.**

Always there would be a car too close behind him. Or he would be tailgating. Or someone would be approaching from the opposite direction. One night, a horny couple in a Corolla was occupying the parking area at the trailhead. Or it would threaten rain and he would take the Escalade, and that was no good because if Alex didn't want to leave the Escalade, it would take Ghost Rider to pry him out. They waited for the right time: the right car, the right weather, above all the right traffic. The waiting grew boring enough to almost make Robbie forget that they were planning a murder.

Uber. Canelo's. Re-reading his notes on his GED prep books. Meds. Teaching Gabe about engines and suspensions and cooling systems, all those interconnected polysyllables that Gabe soaked up like a sponge. Cooking. Youtube tutorials—making chicken soup from scratch.

Once, while he was pouring soup into old margarine tubs to put in the freezer, Eli poked at the back of his head. **Kid. Kid. Hey. Come look.**

_What?_

**Come outside. Look.**

Robbie set the pot of soup back on the stove and trudged out to the street where the Charger sat. It looked odd—he couldn't quite put his finger on it, but hurt his brain in the same way that Deep Dream video on Youtube of a frog made out of rapidly-morphing pictures of trolley cars did. _What are you doing?_

**Am I a Volvo yet?**

_You'll attract attention._

**Shit. I've almost got it.**

_Practice when you're in the garage then._

He caught a red-eye pax on one of those nights before they were due to head to Flintridge.

“Eliot?”

“Yessir. Jim?”

“Yeah.”

Jim traveled light, with a small overnight bag that couldn't hold much more than a shaving kit and a change of clothes. He kept the bag with him in the footwell when he got in. He was middle-aged but fit, dressed in khakis and an off-brand polo shirt, with small reading glasses and carefully tended straight brown hair that fell to his shoulders. He had an Ace bandage around his left wrist. His fingers were thick and slightly crooked. Robbie put the car in gear and headed off toward LAX.

“That's a very distinctive tone,” Jim said out of nowhere as they accelerated up an empty on-ramp to the freeway.

“Huh?”

“The sound of the supercharger.”

**Holy shit, take another look at this guy.**

Robbie obliged. White guy, good-looking but a little weathered, forties or fifties. He'd looked as short as Robbie as he'd waited at the curb for him. Blue eyes. Steady, intense gaze.

**Forget Alex Northwick, we oughta kill _him._ Eliot Fucking Spencer.**

_Who?_

**Damian Moreau's favorite attack dog. This man is an _animal._ He'd kill you six different ways before you hit the floor. He'd kill your pets. He'd kill your mother. He'd string your kids up on the front lawn. Once the Albanians sent an Albanian SWAT team after him, and he killed 'em all before they even left the van. Once he brought a feather pillow to a gunfight and won. They say he can hit a quarter at three hundred yards with any gun ever made, while blindfolded and riding a mechanical bull. He's a legend. A ghost. I'm shocked he's still alive, frankly. Shocked and appalled. We gotta do something about this.**

_You know this how?_

**Everybody knows.**

Robbie drummed his thumbs on the wheel as they cruised through the light traffic of the black hours after midnight. “So, where're you headed, sir?”

“Ontario,” 'Jim' replied. He was texting on his phone, but he kept looking up and around after every few words: glance at Robbie. Glance out the windshield, and at the side mirror.

“Sounds exhausting.”

“Jet lag's not so bad going East. And it's cheaper to fly the red-eyes—I'm a geologist and the pay's not as good as you'd think, believe me.”

**Smooth, self-deprecating bastard. Makes you wanna sit down and offer him a beer, don't it?**

'Jim' continued. “Say, how do you like driving for Uber?”

Robbie raised his eyebrows, surprised. “It's all right. The app's a little frustrating, sometimes. But it helps pay the bills.”

“Can't believe you let strangers ride in a car like this. I hear they're collectible. Rare.”

“Would you believe it's the first car I got?”

“How'd you afford it? If you don't mind me asking. Sorry if that's too personal.”

“No, no. I'm a mechanic at my day job.” **What are you doing, don't tell Eliot Spencer our real identity.** “Some shady guy dropped it off at the shop for some major repairs. Then he never paid. When that happens, the shop takes possession of the car, and my boss let me have it because I did the work, then stuck with him through some—” gang shootings— “difficulties.”

“That was nice of him.”

Honestly, it was. Now if only Canelo would stop 'accidentally' shorting his pay.

“Not a lot of mechanics nowadays know how to take care of cars from this era. I'm impressed. Who taught you?”

“My boss.”

“At the auto shop?”

 _Who else?_ “Yessir.”

'Jim' was scrolling through his phone. Not texts now: what looked like newspaper articles. He pushed his reading glasses further up on his nose.

 **What's he looking at?** “What are you reading?”

'Jim' gave a little jump, the timing just off enough to ring false. “Article on collectible cars. Street rods. Says here that narcotics traffickers are heavily involved in street racing in Los Angeles. I hope this car doesn't make you a target for those people.”

“No, just the cops,” Robbie muttered. “I mean, it hasn't been a problem.”

“Well, we live in a dangerous world. It's good to have options.” He opened his bag, and Eli watched through Robbie's eyes like a snake. 'Jim' got out a business card. Just an ordinary business card, simple black and white, a word and a phone number. He looked right at Robbie then, and he seemed to occupy more space somehow, his muscles tense, his eyes searching. “Anything this valuable is usually trouble. Either there's strings attached, or it puts a target on your back. You seem like a good kid under a lot of pressure. You want help lifting some of that pressure, you call this number. They can help.”

Robbie looked down at the card like it was going to bite him. “Thanks,” he said dubiously. “You said you're a geologist?”

“I do some social work on the side.”

_Eli, this isn't matching up at all. If he's a gun for hire, why would he offer free services?_

**Boredom? Practice? I'm telling you, this guy is _worse_ than me. Ask anyone. **

'Jim' left the business card on the dashboard and studied his phone again. “It says here a famous serial killer used to own a car just like this,” he said, innocent and unassuming again.

**Let me see that. It does not! He's reading about the cars seized from Grumpy's place. That's a police report. How'd he even get that?**

'Jim' looked up. “Does the name 'Eli Morrow' mean anything to you?”

Robbie bared his teeth. “Yeah, I heard he used to live around here. Psycho mob gunman? His own bosses ratted on him for being too crazy and he tried to win a shoot-out with the entire LAPD? What a dumbass. Great taste in cars, though.”

Eli's rage burned behind Robbie's eyes. Robbie helped himself to a water.

They arrived at the airport's drop-off area. “Thanks for the trip, Eliot.”

“You're welcome El—Jim. Sir.”

'Jim' paused with the door open and fixed Robbie with a long look.

“Jim!” yelled a tall blonde woman from a dogwood tree in a big planter garden in the middle of the concrete apron. Thin, ropy muscles under a fashionable skirt-suit, mid-thirties. She flipped down out of the tree and a lanky Black man of about the same age joined her from the bench nearer the airport's vestibule. “Who's this?”

“Yeah, 'Jim,' who is this guy in the 1969 Dodge Charger?”

_**Shit.** _

“No one,” 'Jim' said, still staring at Robbie. “I think. You keep your nose clean, kid.”

“Yessir,” Robbie said, and drove off.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sooo...Eli's ace here. Why?  
> 1\. Convenience. Author literally finds it easier to write a serial killer than someone who experiences sexual attraction.  
> 2\. Eli has not shown *any* sexual interest in canon. And with a psychopath...you wouldn't miss it. They just don't keep a lid on their shit. Look at Donald Trump talking about how he'd screw his own daughter. We really would have seen something. We've seen sexism--but that's not desire. I know this is due to comics code censorship, we can't have a voice in Robbie's head rating the body parts of every woman he walks past all the time, but it's censorship that I prefer to maintain.  
> 3\. Does anyone *want* Eli to express sexual desire? I mean. It could be so much worse.
> 
> Why is there no tag for an asexual character? Because Eli Morrow is not the ace representation that anyone wants!


	5. You must be made to suffer as you have made others suffer—you must feel their pain.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Robbie keeps his deal.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is mostly graphic violence. See the bottom note for specific warnings.

Five twenty-seven in the morning, Robbie waited at his tree overlooking La Tuna Canyon Road, and he heard the now-familiar buzz and whine of Northwick's Lotus racing East through the curves. He saw the lights approaching, and scanned the two-lane below him.

There was no one else on the road. No one from the West, no one behind or in front of the Lotus from the East.

_Eli—_

**Yes! Go, go!**

They ghosted up and ported into the car, powered down and put it in gear. Raced over the gravel. All the lights off, even the military-style red illumination Eli had installed for the dashboard read-outs. The Lotus was coming up behind them, they had seconds only. Front tires on the tarmac, rear tires on the tarmac. Punch it! The motor roared, the blower shrieked. With their eyes adjusted to the dark, the dim twilight was plenty to keep them straight as they gunned the motor, twenty, fifty miles an hour. The Lotus whipped around the blind turn just behind them, and at that moment, Robbie heaved on the wheel, yanked the brake, and broke traction. Teeth grinding on a mouthguard, staring out the right window into oncoming lights styled like animal eyes, holding that perfect sideways slide as they blocked half the roadway.

This was the plan: They would force Alex Northwick into a low-speed, front-end collision. Absorb his impact on the Charger's right side. Take advantage of the Lotus's front airbags, protect him from a seventy-five mile an hour crash into the hillside or the guardrail, catch him like a baseball mitt. This was the night, this was what they had trained for.

The lights raced closer and closer. Then they stopped approaching. Then they started to fall behind, and the Charger was still drifting.

A 2005 Lotus Elise could stop from seventy-five miles per hour inside one hundred and sixty feet.

_**No. No!** _

They kicked the wheel over. The front wheels caught traction again, and with a jiggle and shimmy the rear wheels swung the rest of the way around into a full turn. Now they faced the Lotus. Robbie threw into first gear and punched the gas, the whole front end of the Charger rising up on the shocks. Ahead of them, the Lotus pulled forward as if to T-turn, but too slow. They clipped the Lotus on its rear bumper and sent it into a spin that carried it back across the road against the guardrail.

The whole thing had taken ten seconds. Robbie's vantage point up the hill could survey twenty seconds of road in either direction, so they had ten more seconds left. He popped the trunk and let Eli control his body.

Eli burst out of the car like a hungry leopard, straight to where the battered Lotus rested on the shoulder, Alex Northwick fumbling against the airbag in his face. Eli yanked a sock full of lead fishing weights out of Robbie's pocket and swung it in a practiced arc at the base of Northwick's head. Northwick stiffened like he'd been shocked, then slumped into the airbag. Eli reached into the vehicle, opened the driver's door, shoved the airbag out of his way, unbuckled Northwick, heaved him into a fireman's carry, quickmarched him to the back of the Charger, and dumped him in the trunk. Shoved a wayward foot down inside. Slam. Into the driver's seat. Gunned the motor again. Gone in twenty seconds.

_Gimme the wheel back._

**Sure, kid. Say thank you?**

_Thank-you._

**Good boy.**

Robbie shook as Eli sank back beneath his skin. He never could have done that. That was practice and confidence from decades of sapping people in the head and dragging them out of wrecked cars. Eli was like a one-man pit-crew of kidnapping. Robbie would have fumbled for the door handle and the seat-belt. He would have missed with the sock full of lead. He would have struggled to situate Alex over his shoulder, and stumbled on his way to the trunk. He would have looked down at Northwick's startled, confused face, and hesitated.

**Put the lights on so we don't look like criminals.**

_Right._

The left front beam was broken, and now that the adrenaline was starting to fade, Robbie felt it as a stabbing pain in his eye. He heard a thump, felt a kick somewhere in his gut.

Holy shit, he'd just kidnapped a doctor and stuffed him in his trunk.

**I told you already. Trunk's completely escape-proof. I welded the lining in myself.**

“Okay,” Robbie breathed. “Okay.”

What was he doing? Why had he done this?

**Alex Northwick tortured and murdered an innocent woman and you think he should pay.**

Right.

He drove to his usual teleport site under the sparking power transformer, checked up and down the alley in case someone was sleeping there, or they'd installed a camera the previous night for some ungodly reason. Nothing and no one. Burned up himself and the car, felt the shattered light and dented fender heal as though they'd never been injured. Heard Northwick cursing the heat from inside the trunk. They opened a great hole of fire and darkness in the asphalt below them and plunged in.

They emerged in Angeles National Forest, high on an open ridge of rocky soil and hardy high-mountain shrubs. They'd scouted the spot weeks back, ported there with the car using satellite imagery. It was isolated. No documented walking trails led to it; decades ago, the slopes had been clear-cut, but the logging trails were overgrown, and now it reared out of a trackless wilderness of crowded young trees. Robbie had never been able to identify 'Our Mountain' from Candace Guitierrez's picture-perfect, staged Facebook photos. But he'd found Alex the next best thing: a commanding view, and no way out.

He killed the engine, picked up the body hammer that waited in the footwell, and got out, swinging the keys back and forth around their ring. Back and forth. Ching-shink. Ching-shink.

He stalked to the back of the car and put the key in the trunk lock.

Eli tried to heat the back of his eyes. ** Aren't you forgetting something? **

_No._

He opened the trunk.

Dawn was still over an hour away, but the sky was lightening. It was a cold soft light, enough to walk by, too little to read a newspaper or a face. Inside the trunk, Eli had replaced the automatic lamp: red, to save a killer's night vision. Robbie swung the lid up and looked down on a human form, outlined in dull red and deep shadow.

“What the fuck?” the man demanded, in a strong Valley accent. “Is this a prank or a ransom? Do I know you?”

“Get out,” Robbie said.

The man climbed out, clutching his head. “What the fuck. I know I don't know you. Are you a stupid criminal? Am I in _Fargo?_ Christ.”

Robbie stared at him, as Alex Northwick staggered away from the car, got his feet under him, surveyed the bald hilltop that sloped into trackless pine forest at one end and a steep rocky grade at the other, looked from the lightening sky to the out-of-place Charger. He was tall, in person. Rangy. Not calm, exactly, but not blustering or panicking like Robbie had come to expect. Robbie centered himself, took slow, calming breaths until the taste of exhaust fumes in the back of his throat faded away, and it was just his human heart pumping adrenaline through his veins, just his human brain making his fingers tremble with fury. Until he was certain of his control. No Eli Morrow, no Rider, no phantom helicopters and bullet wounds, no bullshit excuses for what he was about to do. “Listen,” Robbie said. Clipped, harsh. “What if I broke your back.”

Northwick left off his exploration of the hillside to look Robbie up and down. Then, solid eye contact. Blue eyes with crows' feet. “Takes a lot of force to break a back, buddy. Where's everybody else? Is it just you?”

“I break your back,” the words ripped out of him. “I break your hands.” And he thought of Gabe, and all Gabe's classmates at the Development Center, and even Guerro, who strove every day to overcome the bars that life had set around them; he thought of someone outside adding to those bars, like Alex Northwick had done to Candace. “I make your world a cage.”

“Do you want money?” Northwick asked, waving at Robbie with one hand and rubbing the back of his head with the other. “If you want money, you probably need a cell phone. Do you—did you even bring a phone? Why the fuck are we up here?”

“We're here to talk about Candace Gutierrez,” Robbie rasped.

“O-oh,” Alex Northwick said, slow, drawn-out. He slitted his eyes like a poker player. “What about Candace?”

“Why did you do it?”

“Do what? Ask her to marry me? Give her a car? Pinch her ass?” Northwick looked Robbie up and down again, as though to emphasize the difference in their heights. “Be specific.”

“Kill her.”

Northwick took a long slow breath and scanned the hilltop again. “I'd complain you hadn't read me my rights yet, but you're way too young to be a cop. Who are you? Family? On her dad's side? Or was the bitch fucking you the whole time?”

“Answer me.”

“Or what?” Northwick advanced on him. “Making wild accusations on a productive member of society is rude. But assault and kidnapping is very, very illegal. Why don't you tell me what you think you know, and we agree to forget about you dragging me up here when I have patients waiting.”

Robbie felt a shiver run up him, a brutal spike of electric nausea. The rage was building hot within his core, but banking it down was a furnace-wall of fear and horror: he was about to kill a man. He could let Alex Northwick go, even now he could turn away. “The footage. The paperwork. You cut her apart.” He took in a long, shaking breath. “You caged her and you hurt her and broke her. She loved you, and you killed her.” He tightened his fist around his hammer. “What kind of monster kills someone who loves them like that?”

“Whoa,” said Northwick, sidling toward Robbie's left, away from the hammer. “The break-in at the hospital, that was you?”

“Yeah,” Robbie said. “I know you killed her. I know you cut her apart. _Why?_ ”

Northwick stopped and raised his hands. “Okay. Okay...It was an accident. Of course it was an accident, I loved Candace, I was gonna marry her. But she was aggressive, generally, sexually—there was always a lot of shoving and slaps and roughhousing, that's how we communicated. How she liked it. We fought a lot. Physically. And I pushed her, and she tripped—fell down the stairs—hit her head on the counter. And I—was ashamed. I panicked. She was dead. I didn't want—didn't want her family to have to see her like that. Identify her body. So I—took care of her. But all I wanted was to spare her family pain—”

“Shut up.” Robbie twirled the hammer in his hand—or maybe Eli twirled it—aghast at the slanders that poured from Alex Northwick's mouth. “Candace Gutierrez was innocent. You killed her. I'm going to make you feel all the pain she felt, and then I'm going to kill you.”

“Okay, amigo,” Northwick said, backpedalling. His right hand was stuck deep in the pocket of his trousers. “Who have you talked about this with?”

“No one.”

“Well, thank god for small favors,” Northwick said. And then he rushed Robbie, low, a football tackle. He kept his left arm over his head, got inside the arc of Robbie's hammer. Diverted Robbie's reflexive swing into a weak blow that glanced off his back. Piled Robbie to the hard bare ground, laid his forearm across Robbie's throat.

 _Eli,_ Robbie thought. He pulled the hammer back for another swing, clipped Northwick on the back of the head, but the angle was bad, Northwick dropped with the blow, flattening himself over Robbie’s torso, and then he caught Robbie’s arm below the wrist and dragged it across Robbie’s chest, getting both Robbie’s wrist and opposite elbow pinned to the ground under the same hand. _Eli!_

 **Bastard’s got some moves,** Eli remarked, as Northwick pinned Robbie’s hips to the ground with his entire weight. **Wrestling? Judo?** Robbie bucked and struggled. He was strong, he worked heavy labor in the auto shop, but he was still just a scrawny nineteen-year-old, all legs. He had no leverage. Alex Northwick’s hand was big enough to grip both his arms at the same time, even as Alex leaned aside, switched from his right hand to his left, and pulled a small folding knife out of his right trouser pocket. **What’s he think he’s gonna do with that pen-knife?**

Robbie felt the fires of his rage fade within him—fear smothered them. And Eli was also, perversely, tamping them down.

“You don't have HIV?” Northwick asked abruptly. “Ever done injection drugs? No? _Sweet_.”

As Robbie struggled and growled, pinned to the stony earth, Alex Northwick ran his knife hand under his shirt and stabbed him deeply through the navel. Robbie howled. The pain was electric, sparking all along his body, a chill biting ache, a nauseous snapping tear as Alex shoved the knife forward, slicing toward his ribs. “Eli!” Robbie sobbed. “Help!”

**Hang on, it’s not every day you get to learn knifework from a trauma surgeon.**

Alex curled his lip and shoved his knife hand violently forward. There was a sick wet crunch as something soft within Robbie’s abdomen ruptured. Then a pressure on his diaphragm—a punch, like the wind was knocked out of him. He sucked in air involuntarily. Managed to get his right hand free, dropped the hammer in his panic. Northwick’s arm was inside him almost up to the elbow. His face was a mask of glee, his teeth and the whites of his eyes flashing in the oncoming dawn, his pupils dilated, his breath coming in eager hisses.

“Eli!” Robbie's voice was weak, and suddenly there was a rush of cold, and though his chest heaved uncontrollably, he couldn't get any air. _He's killing me,_ he mouthed. _Help me, you bastard._ Robbie felt a terrible weight crushing him to the rocks, as Alex leaned close over his face, staring intently into his eyes: the last thing Robbie saw before his vision blacked out.

As Robbie fainted from two collapsed lungs and Alex Northwick's fist wrapped around his heart, Eli let off the brakes and let the transformation ignite. White heat cracked the stones beneath them and Alex Northwick rolled away with a shocked cry. Robbie's flesh and clothing burned and boiled off in a blast of smoke and steam, burnt meat and hair and petroleum fumes, and then the blaze condensed behind the sleek black racing suit that was the Rider's skin. Steel plates rose from his skull; flames spurted from every vent and seam. Eli twitched hands and feet, rolled the Rider to his knees, folded down, and coughed up the half-melted remains of Northwick's pocketknife. “ **You decided to be a doctor when you watched** _ **Temple of Doom**_ **as a kid, didn't you?** ” Eli asked, standing and turning toward Northwick, who lay crumpled on the ground beside him.

Northwick's hair was singed, his face shiny and red. He was clutching his forearm in a tight, convulsive grip with his left hand, as he stared disbelieving at the black, charred remains of his right: fragile bones and seared tendons jutting from black and gray flesh like birch twigs in winter.

“ **Betcha wished you'd used your non-dominant hand,** ” Eli crowed. “ **Oh, well. Get you a hook. A prosthetic. You can always teach, right? It's not like your life's completely over, right?** ” He kicked Northwick in the back. Northwick released his right arm with obvious effort and picked up a rock. “ **Just kidding. We're gonna kill you.** ”

“What the fuck are you,” Northwick demanded, voice cracking with pain. He flung the rock and it bounced off the Rider's eye-socket.

“ **We're a spirit of vengeance,** ” Eli said, spreading his arms and twitching his fingers, _come at me._ “ **Or, I'm just a regular old vengeful spirit. But my nephew here—he's the one you tried to eviscerate—he's got this righteous mission kick, and something about you rubs him the wrong way. God knows why. You're not the most prolific murderer in the world. Sure as hell not a guy who'll never be missed. But he's got his sights set on you like a dog with a bone. Who am I to deny the kid? Come on. Hit me.** ”

Northwick picked up a bigger rock, flung it, got the Rider in the throat. Then he circled around and got the discarded hammer. Swung, pointy-end first. Eli caught it, letting the spike rip right through the Rider's palm and fire chase down the handle. Northwick dropped it with a gasp, and Eli ripped it free and twirled it between his fingers.

“Do you want money?”

“ **You got some?** ”

“Yeah—gimme a week, I'll have my broker—”

“ **Sorry, doc. Cash only.** ” Eli lashed out, a playful swing that missed Northwick's head deliberately, clipped him on the collarbone. “ **Wake up, Robbie. You're missing the party.** ” Eli lunged at him as he ducked away. Northwick swung at his face with the ruins of his right hand; Eli opened the Rider's jaws and bit through four fingers. Spat burning coals in Northwick's face. “ **Your girl left a buncha diagrams of what you did to her. Like so.** ” He wrapped leathery hands around Northwick's neck, squeezed until his jegs started kicking and his eyes rolled back, then released. Clinched him behind the head, kneed him in the gut, grabbed him savagely by the back of the thigh until he felt muscles tear under the Rider's bony fingers. Five or six love-taps to the kidneys, until Northwick was coughing blood.

“I don't deserve this,” he sputtered. “What's Candace to you? It was an accident!”

Eli hooked two fingers into Northwick's nostrils and lifted him up, until he was standing on tiptoes, head tipped to the sky, clinging to the Rider's hot wrist with his remaining hand. “ **It's shit like that, pisses** _ **me**_ **off,** ” he rumbled. “ **'Accident.' You 'accidentally' pull off a near-perfect murder.** ” He felt the kid stirring in the back of his head, pulling himself together, watching, listening. “ **Bullshit like that is an insult to my chosen profession. Do you have any idea how much** _ **work**_ **it takes? Not even starting on covering it up. The kill itself.** ” He tapped Northwick in the head with the side of his hammer. “ **Humans are tough. See?** ” A harder strike to the ribs, a satisfying crunch. Northwick cried out and made a fruitless grab for the hammer. “ **Skilled surgeon like you could patch that up no problem. But to kill? You ever accidentally kill a patient, doc? Huh? Better: you ever accidentally** _ **save**_ **one? Bull** _ **shit**_ **, killing her was an accident. You didn't 'one day go too far.' No.** ” He threw Northwick to the ground and kicked him in the balls. A wave of disorientation struck Eli as Robbie rose up, joining his rage with the Rider. “ _ **You just finally went all the way.**_ ”

The Rider loomed over Northwick, back stiff, blazing and spitting with new fire.

**What's next? It's your show.**

_He needs to understand._ Robbie cracked the Rider's knuckles, reached down through their shadow, drew the chain out of the trunk of the car where it blazed and rumbled behind them. Shook out the links and snapped them taut. “ _If you make it to the tree, I let you go._ ”

“What the fuck?” Northwick spat.

**What the fuck?**

“ _A deal. You make it to the tree, I let you go. Get up._ ” Northwick struggled to his feet. Staggered, clutched his side. Bolted for the nearest tree on the bald hilltop, down where it started to slope into the forest, with an uneven, hamstrung gait. The Rider lashed out with the chain, speared Northwick on one of Eli's knives. “ _Too slow. Try again._ ” A flick of his wrist and the chain wrapped Northwick tight, shoulders to waist, and jerked him backward over the rocks. 

“You fucker!” Northwick howled.

“ **You don't like my deal?** ” The Rider coiled and uncoiled the chains, swirling the knives on each end like a cowboy playing with a lariat. 

“No, I'll take it, I'll take it!”

“ _Okay._ ” The Rider gave him a little wave. “ _Go._ ”

Northwick ran. The Rider strolled behind him, slow, blazing, emitting a continuous rumble and hiss. The nearest tree of any size was a Ponderosa, young, a trunk about two feet across; Northwick was inches from it, left hand outstretched to touch its fissured red bark, when the Rider melted out of its shadow, caught Northwick's wrist in a steely grip. The Rider grabbed his elbow and snapped his forearm, the same place Candace's arm had been broken. “ **Oh, bad luck.** _Try again._ ” The Rider picked him up by the armpits and flung him thirty feet away, to skid over the rocky ground to stop inches from the fiery rear tire of the Charger. 

Northwick picked himself up and snarled at him. Blood ran down from his nose and mouth and he clutched both arms about his waist. The Rider took a slow deliberate sidestep, out of the way of the tree. Then another, and another. Northwick turned aside and flung himself instead at the burning Charger, into the open driver's door. Threw the shifter into second with his half-burnt elbow, and took off down the hill, bulldozing through rocks and trees. The Rider sank into the ground and melted into the car. Watched through the rear-view mirror as Northwick struggled to control the vehicle by sticking the remains of his right arm through the steering wheel. **Tough bastard.** The Rider congealed out of the passenger seat, waited for Northwick to notice, caught up as he was in the pain of his body and the Charger's rapid and bouncing descent down the mountainside. Finally the Rider reached across and gripped the wheel. Northwick tried to dive out the open door; the Rider hissed and yanked him back into the driver's seat. Steered them rapidly back uphill. “ **That's not in the play-book, Doc.** _Get out. Try again._ ” They flew into the air when they hit the hilltop and ran out of slope. Crashed to a stop. The Rider shoved Northwick out to roll onto the gravel. 

Northwick ran. No sidestepping. Straight for the young pine tree. He flattened his back against its trunk, supporting himself on shaking legs. The Rider strolled toward him, whipping and snapping his hot shining chain. “That's it?” he demanded. “I made it! I get to go now, that's what you said!” The Rider whirled the knife on the end of his chain, and no, it wasn't a knife, it was a crowbar. “Stop! You said you'd let me go!”

“ _Wrong tree._ ” Whack. Shattered Northwick's instep.

“FUCK!”

“ _Try again._ ”

Northwick ran, and the Rider caught him. Sometimes Northwick landed on his face, sometimes on one of his maimed arms. Sometimes the chains stabbed or burned him. Always he struggled to his feet, cast about for his escape. But each time he was slower to rise.

“ _I make your world a cage._ ”

“Let me go,” Northwick rasped, struggling to regain his feet. “Why the fuck are you doing this, let me go.”

The Rider lifted him with one hand under the jaw. “ _You killed Candace Gutierrez. She was innocent. Like I used to be._ ”

“I'm _sorry,_ okay? Let me go! I help people, I'm a doctor. I made a mistake—tell me the rules or stop lying to me, you self-righteous fuck!”

“ _If you make it to the tree, I let you go._ ”

“So tell me which tree! I can't succeed if you don't tell me the fucking conditions!”

**Now he's getting it.**

“ _Hyiiiirh._ ” The Rider flung him away, made a curt gesture with one hand. Northwick got up onto one knee, bracing himself on his right elbow. 

“I don't deserve this,” he snarled. He collapsed suddenly, letting out an involuntary sob. “I don't. I don't. You're just—why are you torturing me?”

The Rider snapped out the chains, coiled him tight, jerked him back. Bellowed in his face, wordless snarls and howls of the engine. Lifted him overhead and shook him, stared into his red, bruised eyes through steel-rimmed pits of flame. _He needs to understand. WHY DOESN'T HE UNDERSTAND?_ Four years Alex Northwick had trapped and tormented Candace Gutierrez, preying on her affection and confining her with fear, shaping her and diminishing her until that final desecration on the morgue table. Northwick's unbruised eye was wide, bloodshot, white fear showing all the way around. The Rider roared. “ _¡MATASTE UN INOCENTE!_ ”

**Kid. He's not going to understand. I mean. I think he's figured out that he's going to die. But he's never going to say he deserves it.**

_He killed her!_ The Rider whipped Northwick through the air, flung him free from the chains. As the Rider stormed toward him, Northwick began to crawl.  _He killed her for no reason! He killed her because she loved him!_

**He's not going to understand. Trust me. I know because it's been over a month and I barely understand what you're going on about, myself. We're not here to teach this guy a lesson. We're here to kill him. Put him outta his misery already.**

The Rider came to a stop at Northwick's head. Northwick began to wriggle backward. Still working toward some escape: two maimed arms, broken ribs, a destroyed knee and hamstring, a broken foot, a concussion, blackening eyes, burns. He was alive. He could live. He could teach medicine. He could retire to a psychiatric clinic, recovering from his injuries, where possible. He could rebuild his life, or rot in his parents' mansion.

If Candace were here, if she'd survived or if her ghost were standing above Alex Northwick, perhaps she would plead with the Rider for his life. She had been a merciful person. Forgiving. Unless death had finally exhausted her reserves of mercy.

Well. Candace wasn't here.

There was a hammer swaying from the end of the Rider's chain now. _Where should I hit him._

**Pointy end through the base of the skull. Want me to drive?**

_ No.  _ Robbie made the Rider raise the hammer high, kneel one knee on Northwick's back. 

Northwick struggled to turn his head, to look over his shoulder. There was no defiance on his face now, no cunning, no arrogance. Just terror. Just a mortal man, helpless before his own death. “No. No!”

Had Candace looked at Alex like that, before he'd killed her? Robbie wondered. Had Alex felt this disgust, this vicious triumph that the Rider felt?

He swung. The spike end splintered the bone and sank in all the way to the handle. Northwick jerked, head and heels arching backward, and made a terrible hoarse cry. Robbie ripped the hammer out and hit him again. Again. Alex Northwick was still trembling, and now he was making deep, gulping gasps, eyes fixed ahead, lips drawn back. Breathing into the gravel. Robbie felt a wash of horror.

** Don't you dare snuff out, ** Eli snarled.  ** Pull yourself together. Get rid of the body. **

_He's not dying, he's still—_

**He's dead. Trust me. You did perfect. You just gave him a good scare first, so he'll be twitching for a while. That is one dead doctor. Now open a portal and send him away, like Yegor Ivanov. Like you were gonna do to that cop. You remember how?**

The Rider's flames were fading, smoking. Robbie dropped the hammer with slack, leathery fingers.

**This is a rapist and a torturer. That's why you picked him. Now send him where he belongs.**

Robbie watched the broken body as it shuddered on the ground. Wrapped leather palms around the back of his head, ran skeletal gloved fingers over the vents and plates of the Rider's skull. Stoked up his rage: rage at Alex Northwick for all the misery in Candace's coded diary and for stamping out all her young potential, rage at the mercenaries who had killed Robbie almost a year ago, rage at Hillrock Heights and its seediness and hopelessness and despair, at his mother and father for vanishing to leave Robbie and Gabe to struggle on alone, at Eli for driving him to kill, at himself for obeying. Heat and power jetted out of his vents, sputtered between his teeth. The Rider picked up the chain, stood, began to swing the chain faster and faster over Northwick's body, flinging it out in a spiral. The rocks beneath the body glowed, shifted. The chain whipped up an updraft, sucking smoke from below the ground, then fire, and at last the stony ground opened onto darkness and the body burned and shriveled and dropped into the void.

Robbie let the chain fall, and the ground sealed itself before the links rattled on the stones. The thin alpine plants were scorched and there was a faint smoky residue on the rocks.

He heard the click and creak of the car door opening. Let Eli move his feet and sit the Rider in the driver's seat, open a portal, drive them through the shadows to a garbage alley in Hillrock Heights. They snuffed out.

Robbie sat in the driver's seat, running his hands over the wheel, taking short, choked breaths.

**Congratulations,** Eli said.  **Your first premeditated murder. Only took you eight months.**

Robbie pressed his palms into his eyes, felt tears wet the leather of his driving gloves. It was over, he'd kept his deal with Eli, he'd found someone who deserved to die, and he should be relieved, or—or guilty, but instead he found his mind spinning back to that instant he'd swung the hammer into Alex Northwick's skull and he regretted that so strongly his hands shook, _because he wasn't done with him._

**You deserve an ice cream. No, wait, it's still six in the morning. You deserve one o'those coffee-based milkshakes. Crapucchino. Treat yourself to a Crapucchino.**

Robbie shook his head. He sobbed, once, twice, and then the sobs turned into dry-heaving, his head pressed against the unyielding hub of the steering wheel.

**Hey. Hey. Kid. It gets easier. Next one's gonna be way easier. You don't have my natural aptitude, but you just need practice.**

_It's already easy,_ Robbie snarled.  _It was too easy. It should never be easy, but it was, and I wanted more time, Eli, you made me into a monster and I still want to keep hurting him—_

**Kid, there's only so much the human body can take. I think you squeezed him for all he was worth.**

Candace was still dead. Nothing Alex had suffered could un-do that. Robbie understood this, logically, but still he ached with the feeling of a job half-done, done wrong. _There's something wrong with me._

**No, there's not. If anyone had it coming, it's Northwick. I never liked him as a target because of the heat he could bring down, but damn. If what he did to his girlfriend ain't enough, he tried to cut your heart out. You saw the bloodlust in his eye, the man was an animal. Of course you want him to suffer, and you did a surprisingly good job there. Pat yourself on the back. Have a five-dollar coffee. This is who we are, who _you_ are now, Robbie. You're a killer. You take out the trash, and if you want to be extra-thorough about it, that's fine with me.**

Robbie turned off the engine and sobbed and gagged and panted. Latched his teeth into the sleeve of his jacket. _Please stop talking to me, Eli._

They sat in the alley while Robbie struggled to get his breathing under control. Traffic was picking up in the road beyond, the smoggy sun strengthening. **Getting late.** Time to see Gabe off to school.

Robbie started the car and pulled out into the arterial. Took the side-street that led to his apartment block, parked at the curb, let himself in. Smelled the slightly burnt arroz con pollo he'd made Gabe for dinner twelve hours ago. He was exhausted, but the last thing he wanted to do was sleep.

“Robbie?” Gabe called from the bedroom.

Robbie crept down the hall toward his brother's room, but stopped just before he reached the door. “Yeah. I'm. I'm back. I'll make you breakfast.” He returned to the kitchen and started to boil up some quick-cooking oats and milk. Most home-cooking, he'd learned, compensated for its cost savings by being a massive pain in the ass, and oatmeal was no exception. He stood at the stove and stared down into the porridge as he stirred it, around and around, the steam curling around his fingers. _Button up,_ he thought to himself. _Keep it together._

The oatmeal was thickening up, the steam more sweet than milky when Gabe crutched out to the table, dressed for school in a Fox Racing tee-shirt and a pair of jeans Robbie had bought him last spring that were starting to show a little sock at his ankles already. He watched Robbie seriously as he spooned out the oatmeal in two bowls, added a big dollop of cinnamon applesauce to each to cool them down. “Robbie?” Gabe asked, and Robbie looked at him. At the careful way he stood that kept part of the table between them, the crutches he used instead of the chair even though they rubbed his arms and strained his elbows and exhausted him every day, at the anxious drift of his wide green eyes. He'd been underestimating his little brother. He hated when other people did that.

“Yeah, it's me, Gabe,” Robbie said. “I'm sorry, I—I made breakfast. Can I help you with your chair?”

“Okay, Robbie.” Gabe pushed himself up into the chair with his crutches, then laid them on his lap as Robbie pushed him in to the table. “Oatmeal! You make the tastiest oatmeal, Robbie!”

“Thanks, bro.” Robbie loaded up his spoon and contemplated it for almost a minute before sticking it in his mouth. He was almost too dehydrated for food. He wasn't that hungry. He had half the bowl left when Gabe had finished his. He helped Gabe away from the table, and Gabe rinsed his bowl and left it in the sink.

“Robbie, are you sad?”

He hadn't buttoned it up. No use lying. “Yeah,” Robbie said. “I...did something bad.”

“Did you say sorry?” Gabe asked.

Robbie shut his eyes hard. “Sorry means you'll try not to do it again. I think I might have to. Do it again.”

“If you have to do it, why's it bad?”

“Trust me, Gabe.” Robbie dragged his spoon through his oatmeal and wondered why he had squandered perfectly good milk and oats on a murderer like himself. “It was bad.”

“Did Uncle Eli do it for you?”

Robbie shook his head slowly. “No.”

Gabe stared at him for a long moment, tracing his outline with his eyes. “Do you need to see Mr. Fletcher?”

Mr. Fletcher headed the Behavior Management department at the Patrick Wellman Development Center. Gabe saw him off and on, all the kids did, some of them more than others.

“I can't,” Robbie said.

“Can I hug you?”

“Of course.” _Please._ “Please.” He perched sideways on the edge of his chair and Gabe came over and wrapped himself around him, letting his crutches dangle from his forearms. Robbie squeezed back.

“I love you, Robbie.”

Robbie choked. Clutched him a little tighter. “I love you too, Gabe. No matter— _always._ ”

After Gabe got on the bus for school, it was time for Robbie to pop his sleepy pills and crash in his darkened room. Canelo had a half shift for him in four hours. That was not a lot of time for Robbie to waste on any activity other than sleeping, but he turned on his computer anyway. Opened his spreadsheet he'd used to keep track of the camera feeds from the hospital surveillance footage he'd stolen. Checked Facebook, where a complete stranger had just posted about a vacation in Cabo San Lucas—one of Alex's random friends Robbie had used to get close to him. He looked at his browser history—specs and gossip about the safety and maneuverability of the Lotus Elise, dozens of pages. He looked at the sheets of brainstorming and surveillance records he'd written out by hand in a spiral notebook. He had stalked Alex Northwick for over a month. He'd decided to kill him over two weeks ago, when he'd pushed play on the footage from the morgue. Those minutes on the hilltop were the culmination of over a hundred hours of thefts and research and planning, and now Alex was gone. Dead. Finished.

Except Robbie still had that sick hollow feeling that he wasn't finished at all.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter, Robbie kills Alex Northwick. It is not self-defense. He has the option of stopping. Eli does not do it for him.  
> Before killing him, Robbie and Eli beat him, break bones, and play mind-games with him. Alex gets his hand burned off.  
> Before that, Alex Northwick tackles Robbie, pins him to the ground, and puts his hand in Robbie's chest. Eli lets him, because Eli doesn't trust Robbie to kill Alex without provocation, and the author doesn't trust the audience to approve (and also loves to whump semi-immortal characters).


	6. People like you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After the murder, life for Robbie and Eli goes on.

Turned out, Robbie Reyes, Killer of Surgeons looked just the same from the outside as Robbie Reyes, Junior Mechanic.

Cheap auto shop customers still tried to convince him they didn't need mandatory safety or maintenance procedures for their own vehicles. After-midnight pax still brought sugary daquiris in disposable cups into his car to spill or vomit on his seats, and early-morning pax still got snitty if he didn't have their particular style of charging cord for their phones. He felt the brand burning on his forehead—Stalker, Murderer, Executioner—but no one could see it. He felt empty inside, hollow, like some load-bearing part had been stripped from him—but he kept going to work, kept driving, kept reviewing his notes for the GED.

God forbid a little thing like premeditated murder make him waste that hundred-and-fifty dollar testing fee.

He accepted a ping from “Kendal,” 4.7 stars, at the Loopy Luau at ten o’clock on a Tuesday, the night before his test was scheduled. That early in the evening was usually one of his lucrative yet cringe-inducing bar-to-strip-club hops. When he pulled up to the curb at the Loopy Luau, he spotted a clean-cut young Asian-American man cornered by three locals in sports jerseys, his back against a drab brown Chevy Longhorn with a prominent scratch against the driver's side door.

“This truck's a collectible,” sneered the tallest of the locals. “You better be good to repaint it, vato, I gotta order the paint special. We settle this now or you're not leaving.”

The kid actually reached for his wallet, and Robbie rolled his eyes, wanted to shake him.

**Fuckwit. Never pay a scammer. You know that, Robbie, you know not to pay scammers.**

_He's gonna get robbed blind._

**This is the same scam as those guys in Phoenix this spring, remember? I helped you beat the shit outta them? That was fun.**

Robbie stewed. Getting body-snatched by Eli was not fun. Feeling his body ripple through unfamiliar combinations of vicious punches and elbow strikes, seeing teeth and blood fly when all he'd wanted was to stick up for himself was not fun. His palms heated on the steering wheel and he tasted burning oil as he exhaled.

There was a good chance the up-towner was his pax. He had to scare the scammers off so he could pick up Kendal and earn his fare. But there was no way he was going Ghost Rider on some street toughs right outside a crowded bar, or letting Eli have his way and pick a fight with three men who together outweighed Robbie five times. No matter how much Robbie hated them.

He pulled up cross-wise to the Longhorn's tailgate, revved the engine aggressively, and hit the parking brake. He sparked up just enough to reach through the door for a lug wrench from the trunk, then shut it down before he burned out his eyes and caused more of a scene than he needed. He shoved the door open and got out of the car, circling toward the Longhorn, wrench concealed under his arm. “That paint's original. So's the dent on the fender. I know a good body guy, smooth that out for you.”

“Fuck off, kid,” yelled the nearest man. “This is business.”

“Same here,” Robbie said, meeting the eyes of the young man backed against the door. “You Kendal? I'm Eliot. Let's go.”

“What?”

“You call an Uber? I'm Eliot. I'm your ride.” He swung the lug wrench to rest against his shoulder.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” demanded the tallest man. “Coming after us with that thing?”

“Could put a few more dents on your truck,” Robbie offered, eyes narrow. “Be good for your business. **Good warm-up for me.** Kendal, move.” Five feet away, the leader wasn't as tall as Northwick. Robbie could feel, in his arm and shoulders, just the right swing to catch him behind his head, could see the blood fly from his scalp, could imagine catching the other two with swinging strikes, gouging cheekbones and eyes. The pax was terrified. His pax. He'd still be terrified if Robbie and Eli cut loose on these guys, but for a better reason.

While the locals were watching Robbie. Kendal slipped backward toward the bar and around the truck. One of the men started to follow him, and Robbie swung the lug wrench, or maybe Eli did it—smooth, like a cowboy twirling a pistol, missing the truck's rear quarter panel by a breath. He opened his passenger door as Kendal approached, jerked his thumb at the Uber sticker. “ **You fuck with my pax, I bust your ride and then I start cracking skulls.** Get in.”

The young man got into the Charger, shaking. Robbie tapped the lug wrench against his shoulder, then when the pax was safely shut in, he darted around to the driver's seat and took off.

“Where to?” he demanded, dropping the wrench in the back footwell. “It's just you, right? We don't have to go back to pick up any friends?”

“Holy shit, you're really my Uber driver?”

“It's just you, right?”

“Yeah, just me. Shit, you just saved my life back there.”

Robbie cut left at the next block and headed toward the nearest arterial. “Not from those guys. They just want money. Where to?”

“USC campus.”

Robbie barked an order at his phone where it rested on the dash.

“You don't have a tablet or a mount or—”

“No.”

“That was so badass, man, you were just _chill._ Cold. And they listened to you, how'd you know, how'd you do that? Does Uber, like, _train_ you?”

“I grew up here.”

“Badass,” Kendal repeated. “No offense, dude, but I'm never coming this way again.”

“Good plan.”

He dropped Kendal off outside a student dormitory that looked like a fancy apartment block with smaller units. As he drove away, alert for new pings, he controlled his breathing and smothered his rage, kept the Rider under wraps. He had a test tomorrow, couldn't go into it with a hangover.

 

* * *

 

The next day at nine in the morning he jogged himself to alertness with a No-Doze and an icy shower, and drove to a testing center to stare at a computer screen for seven hours. Walked into the a low cinderblock building, through the aggressively clean blue-carpeted lobby, signed in on time, still waited almost twenty minutes in the lobby for the bored testing attendant to usher him through the hallway. Turned out his pockets and surrendered his phone, wallet, watch, keys, multitool, jacket, and hoodie, and locked them all in a little imitation-wood cubbie with gum stuck to the inside of the door. Ignored Eli's reminiscence of That Time He Went To Rikers For Armed Robbery He Didn't Commit And Escaped The Same Night As Frank Castle, You Know, The Punisher. Sat down to a bank of little desks in an upholstered chair with a computer screen and a pair of headphones to block out noise, received five sheets of printer paper and a single eraserless pencil-stub, jiggled the mouse, and clicked START.

-  Determine whether the underlined portion in the sentence is correct, or whether it needs to be revised: “Lockers in schools are often dilapidated, making student’s valuables susceptible to theft.”

 _ **Correct.**_ _Wait. The apostrophe's wrong._

-  President Abraham Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s executive order forcing Japanese Americans into internment camps both demonstrate that:

_Civilization is a lie and the world is fucked._

**Wow. You're catching on. Uh, try B.**

_I know. I got this._

-  One third of the candidates for a job were 25 years old or younger. Two sevenths of the candidates were at least 50 years old. If 84 people applied for the job, how many were between 25 and 50?

**What the fuck. Why sevenths.**

_Does it matter._

**Maybe?**

Robbie hashed out the arithmetic with his pencil. Eli's attention wandered.

 -  x = 4m2 y = (2m+ 1)(2m− 1) Given the two equations, what is y in terms of x ?

A great irony of the GED was that Robbie's entire future now hinged on math that he had mastered as a freshman or sophomore, with not a single question on subjects fresher in his mind, like calculus.

**Ugh. Only snipers have to remember this shit. Snipers and accountants.**

_I'm working. Please be quiet._

**This is hellish,** Eli groused as they completed their fourth hour of multiple choice questions and started working on a five-paragraph essay about the pros and cons of single-payer health care, a topic about which Robbie had no unbiased opinions. **I'm telling you, kid. There's better ways to get respect.**

_If it's not about CHIP or Medicaid, don't talk please._

The testing attendant tapped Robbie’s shoulder to let them know it was time for their longest, fifteen minute lunch break, and Eli almost snapped her elbow before Robbie froze their hand in mid-air; of course Eli was hypervigilant as well as homicidal. Robbie had forgotten to bring food, so lunch was a gulp of water out of the hall fountain and a packet of cookies from the vending machine.

**I hate this. This is unreasonable.**

_Go try to make the car look like a Prius or something._

**Rude.** Robbie felt Eli’s presence drift a little farther off, watching pedestrians through the car’s mirrors, probably plotting how to persuade Robbie to murder them.

Break ended after he’d peeled open the cookie packet to lick all the crumbs out. He sat back down to another hour and a half of multiple choice questions and another essay. He’d never been an anxious test-taker, and anyway, it was hard to work up the nerves when he’d just murdered a man last week. Put things in perspective.

If anything, it was hard to care.

He finished the GED a half-hour early, turned in his scratch paper (they counted the sheets), got his belongings back out of the lock-up, and drove home to crash on the couch. An hour’s nap and then he’d pick up Gabe. And then…

Wait for his test to be scored. Talk to Canelo about switching to full time. Look for other auto shops that were hiring, if he’d passed. Check his bank account, see if he needed to pick up more pax before Gabe’s next session with Dr. Dacosta and the next medication refill. Check Gabe’s homework—now he was in eighth grade, they were trying to integrate him into a general education classroom three days a week, but Robbie was concerned he was regressing because he had trouble with the math worksheets; the space on the paper was too small and they didn’t give him enough time. Buy more ingredients for chicken soup.

He heaved himself up, pulled an old margarine tub of chicken soup out of the freezer, and set it on the counter to thaw. His stomach cramped. He got a hot dog out of the fridge and ate it cold over the sink with his bare hands. Returned to the couch.

Stupid No-Doze. He should be sleeping.

Tomorrow he should go to the library, check the news about Alex Northwick. Last he’d seen, on Page 4 of the local paper at the corner store, the police were investigating the crash but keeping the details out of the press. He should check for updates, see if Iris Bao had been caught up in it.

He crushed his face into the seat of the couch.

**You’re gonna cry, huh. Pressure's off, time to have a melt-down? Okay. Whatever keeps you going.**

Robbie ground his teeth and sobbed quietly into the upholstery. He had forty-five minutes until Gabe got out of class, he had money for two weeks and food for one, he was as alone as he ever got, and he was very, very tired.

 

* * *

 

Every time Robbie stayed up when he’d normally have slept, it took three or four days to get his equilibrium back. It was a while before he had the wherewithal for more than going through the motions of being a mechanic and cabbie and big brother and legal guardian, and actually think back on the past few weeks. He was at the shop, headphones screaming local punk rock down his ear canals, scratched safety goggles in place, a clean shop towel tied around his nose and mouth as a dust-mask, hogging the bench grinder as he worked on a cylinder head and its valves. Canelo had him cleaning and reseating the valves of a 1974 El Camino's big block V-8 engine. Should the shop offer valve work when they didn't employ a machinist? Probably not. Did the customer know that his vintage engine had been disassembled by a teenager they paid under the table? No. Would he ever complain and find out? Also no, because Robbie was very good.

There was something deeply peaceful about a valve job. The valves were pleasant to hold and look at: elegant, precisely-machined stems that widened gracefully into a cupped disk at the end. The inside of the cylinder head was also beautiful—soft curves and planes of metal, logical and seamless. A mechanic didn't see the inside of an engine every day, and in some ways, that was the most beautiful part of the car.

The bench grinder bore a brass-wire disk brush. Robbie had a cordless drill to grip the valve stems with; he’d fire up the drill and gently press the back and sides and face of the spinning valve to the spinning brush, polishing off years of carbon, revealing, in today’s case, smooth unmarred steel beneath, the manufacturer’s markings as clear as when it had first been machined. He polished and replaced one valve after another, stabbing each clean valve into a little hole in an old pizza box where he’d numbered it with its place in the cylinder head. Next he’d get the Dremel and a smaller brass brush and the can of toluene solvent Canelo imported from Nevada, and he’d buzz and polish the carbon out of the cylinder head until it gleamed. Then he’d get the little tube of fine-grit lapping paste, and a little dowel with a suction cup to suck on to the valve faces, and he’d set the valves into the cylinder head and rotate them briskly with the suction cup by spinning the dowel between his palms, headphones off and bench tools powered down, listening to the hiss of the lapping paste where the valve and cylinder rubbed together, until the pitch of the sound rose and signaled that the fit of the valve was perfect again.

It was slow, precise work, but with practice, which Robbie had, it came automatically. He got into a flow after the first few valves. Even Eli found it restful, compared it to cleaning his guns, back when he'd had guns, and hands. In the solitude by the bench grinder, Robbie had time to think over the past few weeks.

He had become obsessed with the death of a woman he had never met. He'd always had to work hard to hold back his temper, but ever since he'd died and Eli brought him back, he'd felt more volatile, aggression suffusing his mind and body like gasoline vapor, just waiting for a spark: a severed arm in a plastic bag, seeping watery blood. He'd taken Candace's death personally. He'd resolved to avenge her before he'd even learned her name or heard her story, then sacrificed time, effort, and money he couldn't afford. Out of all the pimps and gun-runners and pushers and kidnappers Ghost Rider had chased out of East L.A. since he'd made his deal with Eli, it was pretty strange that the first person Robbie let them kill was a life-saving surgeon who had only murdered once. And they never did get absolute proof.

He didn't even regret it. He wished he hadn't had to kill anyone, but since he had, he was glad he'd chosen Alex.

Before killing Alex Northwick, Robbie had tortured him. If it weren't for Eli, Robbie would have chased him around that hilltop for hours, shaken him until his brains fell out his nose, trying to teach him a lesson that would never stick.

He'd always thought he took after his mother, her wariness, her temper. But maybe he took after his uncle.

Eli was bound to him, body and soul, ever since they'd killed Yegor Ivanov that summer. Robbie's head was a tight space. With Eli in it, relentlessly advocating that they run over this person, stab that person, and set this other building on fire, of course death would be on Robbie's mind, of course Eli's frustration would bleed into him; he knew that, he expected that. But it wasn't Eli who'd gone after Alex Northwick. Eli had fought him. Robbie had pushed for them to...use him for their deal.

So he'd fulfilled his deal. They'd found a deserving person, and killed him to satisfy Eli's bloodlust—their bloodlust. But Robbie was still angry, all the time. Anxious. Sleepless. Aggressive. Just this week he'd barely stopped himself from caving in the skulls of a few street toughs who'd done nothing worse than shake people down for their credit cards; he still wanted to see their blood fly and hear them scream. Killing Alex hadn't sated Eli or the Rider or blunted the aggression infecting Robbie. Killing Northwick had been, disturbingly, _unsatisfying._

 _Killing him didn't fix anything,_ Robbie thought as he glared down at a shining steel valve-stem. _It didn't help Candace. I'm not safer to be around. I think my psychometry sets off my anger problem; I don't need to kill people for you, I need therapy._

**No. No, no, no. I mean, yes, you do need therapy. You have...so many issues. But you _have_ to kill! To avenge the innocent! You'd rather Northwick was still alive? Unpunished? There's people out there need killing, Robbie. **

_I'm not losing sleep over Northwick. But he's not suffering. He's not **sorry.**_

**Exactly what did you expect? Huh? A written apology? You wanted him chained in a bunker on a drip for a month? Great! But I'd appreciate _a little heads-up_ for special requests! How about some gratitude instead. You twisted my arm to kill him, I tried to hold you back, but you, 'Help me, Eli, show me how to do recon, I ** _**really, really** _ **need to kill a** _**doctor.'**  _ **Murder's not always this life-changing, magical event!** **Next time how about you slow down and savor the moment—because there will be a next time, Robbie. You're a killer. You kill. You kill because the old Robbie Reyes is dead, and now part of you is actually** _**me,** _ **and you kill for your own messed-up reasons, and you'll do it again. And** _**someday** _ **you will stop fuckin' whining about it.**

A bucket slid across the floor toward him, and Robbie kicked it reflexively.

“Sorry, man,” yelled Marty, working on a water-pump on the opposite workbench. “You look like you might puke, is all.”

“I'm fine, thanks,” Robbie said, and polished up another valve.

He completed all the exacting and critically precise grinding and wiping and polishing it took to get the cylinder head spotless and the valves spinning silently in their seats at the brush of a finger, without any tragic mistakes like getting lapping compound on the valve stems, because he knew he was too tired to replay Eli's words in his head and do his job at the same time.

When he'd reassembled the cylinder head and torqued all the nuts back to spec according to an ancient and dog-eared Chilton's handbook, he cleaned up his bench, put away the Dremel and the brass brush, logged his labor time, and stalked between half-assembled cars and open oil-change pits toward Canelo's office to return the can of solvent to the safe.

“Took you long enough,” Canelo mumbled from the desk when Robbie knocked at the open door. He had two sets of hand-written log books open and was busy with a pencil and a calculator. Behind his head hung a calendar displaying a topless, tastefully lit 1959 Eldorado convertible. “She smooth and spotless?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Hand it over.” He held up his free hand and Robbie crossed the concrete floor to give him the addictive solvent.

Canelo's office was exactly as tidy as it needed to be, that is, the walls were propped up by a motley gang of file cabinets, stacks of papers weighted by old bolts and a few toy cars sat on every available surface, the floor was clear of obstacles, and none of the mis-matched chairs wobbled. Robbie couldn't imagine working somewhere else, where his boss had his own boss somewhere miles away, where the office was spic-and-span and hung with corporate promotional literature, but he'd done a lot of things he'd never imagined before this year. He lingered in front of the desk, getting his thoughts straight.

“What now?” Canelo asked, closing his log-books protectively.

“I've worked for you for three years,” Robbie began, “and I haven't caused you any major problems.”

“...True,” Canelo rumbled, mustache twitching.

“It's true I dropped out of school, but I'm getting my high school equivalency. I—” He'd forgotten he'd intended to wait for his test to be scored to have this talk. Damn. “If I pass the GED—”

“When,” interrupted Canelo.

“The score'll come back any day now—”

“Yeah, yeah. I said when.” Canelo held up one finger, pushed himself to his feet, and locked the solvent can into the safe, alongside a few rare parts and a jumble of rubber-banded rolls and stacks of cash. “Let's be real, Reyes. You didn't quit school because you couldn't hack it. You made a calculated financial decision. Now if by some fluke you bombed the GED because you under-prepared, you'll brush up and try again until you pass. Right?” He scowled, raised one eyebrow.

Robbie imagined paying a hundred and fifty dollars to spend an entire day at the testing center again, and briefly wished he'd fallen into the oil pit and broken his neck on the way to the office. “Yeah,” he agreed.

“What do you want?”

Robbie's brain went blank. He rubbed his thumb and fingers together. What did he want?

He wanted fifty thousand dollars. He wanted to sleep for three days. He wanted Gabe's medications to come free for the rest of his life, or, better, for Gabe to magically stop needing them and never have a seizure or a muscle cramp or a digestive problem ever again. He wanted Eli to have refrained from shoving Mom down the stairs while she was pregnant. He wanted to live in a decent neighborhood—not even leave Hillrock Heights necessarily, he just wanted everyone to suddenly be decent to each-other. He wanted Eli to go away. He wanted a five million dollar life-insurance policy for himself on Gabe's behalf, and then he wanted to have an aneurysm.

“I want to become a master automotive technician,” Robbie said at last. “I need to document two years of work history. And I want to work full time on the day shift.”

Canelo sighed and squinted at him. “You just turned eighteen last year, Reyes. Any earlier than that, I won't put on paper.”

“Okay.”

“You want a W-2, you're gonna have to start paying taxes. _I'm_ gonna have to start paying taxes on you. Can't afford another full-timer right now, but I can get you eight more hours a week starting next month. That's assuming you can mind your own damn business. Can you?”

“Yes, I can.”

“Even after Cordova made your brother cry?”

Robbie gritted his teeth. “Yes. I can.” At Canelo's dubious look, he added, “Gabe loved his tamales.”

“Way to a boy's heart is through his stomach.”

Robbie shrugged. Gabe was a brave, kind, forgiving person. _Gabe's_ attitude had nothing to do with Ramón's cooking.

“That it?” Canelo said. “More hours, promise for good behavior, start your paper trail, and the raise I wanted to give you goes to the gov'mint. Anything else?”

“That's all.”

“Good. Take Lenny, put that El Camino back together.”

“Yessir.”

As Robbie turned to leave, Canelo cleared his throat. He paused at the door, looked back.

“You doin' one o'those certificate programs, or gettin' your associate's?”

“What?”

“For your formal training. You should get your associate's in automotive tech. They got it at the community college. Night classes.”

**That's bullshit, you already know more than they can teach you in a classroom, kid. But I'd train you as a professional killer for free. I can lecture while you work.**

“I need to save up before I can think about going back to school,” Robbie said. _No. I said no. No. I am not killing for money._

**If you're not killing for money, you're killing for fun!**

Canelo nodded. “Fair point. You're a smarter man than I was at your age.”

Robbie froze, one hand gripping the door-frame. A man. He was nineteen. He had dependents. An apartment. A job, a plan for a career. He was a man. Why did it feel like he had no control over his destiny, or Gabe's? Was this what it meant to be a man, this desperation, this terror? Freedom, but no power to go anywhere?

**You _do_ have power. _We_ have power. And when you're _really_ desperate, you'll use it.**

“Be sorry to see you go,” Canelo said. “Can't exactly spare fifty grand a year for another master mechanic. Can't always afford to pay myself.”

Robbie felt an unexpected pang of loyalty. “We do good work. And there's not many shops that can handle vintage engines. Word'll get around.”

“Yeah?” Canelo snorted. “That's what I tell myself. But what collector wants to risk driving through Hillrock Heights?”

There was the rub. Half the vintage cars Canelo's shop serviced belonged to local drug dealers, who didn't always provide complete and timely payment. Theoretically, Canelo could repossess the car to cover unpaid charges, but this was only safe to do when the owner was in jail or otherwise indisposed.

Robbie shook his head hard. He didn't want to work at Canelo's forever, anymore than he wanted to stay in Hillrock Heights.

Someone banged hard on the door and Robbie jumped.

“What?” Canelo yelled.

Alejo opened the door, jerked his head urgently. “We got a problem out back.”

“Dammit.” He rose from the desk and stormed out of the office. Robbie trailed behind, unsure if this was one of the times he ought to mind his own business.

Alejo led them out back to the alley by the dumpster, where they kept scrap metal piled under a tarp. Propped against the tarp lay Lenny, a scrawny and anxious white guy Canelo had taken on last year, shortly after the shooting. One foot was bare, the sock wadded neatly into his shoe, and the spaces between his toes looked bruised and swollen. He wasn't moving, and his lips were bluish.

“Call 911,” Canelo ordered with a sigh of disgust.

“Already did,” Alejo said.

“Damn junkies. Oh, well. You get what you pay for. Reyes, looks like I might have forty hours a week for you after all.”

“Does he need CPR?” Robbie asked.

“Probably,” Canelo said. “Who here knows how?”

Robbie got out his phone and found a tutorial. Then he and Alejo took turns giving breaths and chest compressions for the fifteen minutes it took for the paramedics to arrive, revive Lenny with some miraculous injection, strap him to a gurney, and take him away.

 **Waste of time, effort, and money,** Eli commented as the ambulance drove off. Robbie was exhausted, Alejo looked more so, and both their arms were shaking. Robbie's mouth tasted like Lenny's chewing tobacco.

_We just saved a guy's life. Fuck off._

**A junkie.**

_A person._

**He made his choices, kid.**

 

* * *

 

He got a text as he drove from work to pick up Gabe. He reflexively reached for his pocket as if the alert was an Uber ping, then thought better of texting while driving.

Today Gabe had finished his day at Robbie’s old middle school, as part of Dr. Dacosta’s plan to take advantage of his progress in conversation, enunciation, and motor control, and enroll him part-time in inclusive general education classes so he could interact with his “neurotypical peers.” Robbie had been bit his nails over this idea at first, because middle school was a lot more recent for him than for Dr. Dacosta, and his hair stood on end when he imagined those “neurotypical” monsters within spitting range of his little brother. So far nothing horrible had happened, but he still worried. He got out of the car and leaned against the door, tapping his foot. Parents joined him, packing their cars up and down the driveway, idling.

He checked his texts. One unread, from an unknown number.

-Hey E, haven't seen you since that night we went out for milkshakes with N a couple weeks back. Think you could give me and my friends a lift? 2 x 30 mins tonight at 10.

“N” had to be Nora. Robbie hoped this person wanted what he thought they did.

-Happy to. Wait fee 40 per trip and 20 per friend + fare. Text me the address and call a lift on Uber when I get there.

He got a text back almost immediately.

-Cash only

He raised an eyebrow. Replied, -Meter not negotiable.

A long pause. -Fine.

Robbie's thumb hovered over the screen. -How's N?

-Fine.

He smiled. -Good.

A stampede of tweens rumbled out the door to the shrilling of a bell, bobbing and yelling and swinging thirty-pound bags of textbooks. A cluster of them broke off to admire the Charger. Robbie kept half an eye on them in case one tried to touch it, but mostly he scanned the doors for Gabe.

Gabe emerged at last, shuffling along on his crutches. A young man Robbie's age hovered at his elbow, a teaching assistant assigned to help with kids like Gabe. He had neatly combed dark hair in a conservative cut, and wore a polo shirt and slacks; the overall effect made him look even younger than he actually was.

“Hey, buddy!” Robbie yelled, shoving away from the car. He caught up with them as they reached the end of the ramp.

“Robbie-Robbie,” Gabe replied, breathy. Thanks to “mainstreaming,” he had to bring the same thirty pounds of textbooks that the other kids got, but thankfully the learning aide was carrying them for him.

“How was school? You want a piggy-back ride to the car?” Robbie bounced on his toes and knelt down facing him.

Gabe wavered for a minute, his gaze drifting from Robbie’s face to the car and back, and at last he nodded unsteadily and practically fell on him. Robbie helped Gabe out of his crutches, passed them to the aide, and got Gabe situated on his back.

“JP,” he greeted the aide.

“Mr. Reyes,” JP replied. JP was extremely conscientious.

“Hello, JP,” Gabe said sleepily against Robbie’s shoulder. Robbie tensed. Gabe loved greeting people by name, but lately he’d started to save it for when he was actually meeting them.

“How was your day, Gabe?” Robbie asked as they tramped across the concrete toward the car.

“Fine,” Gabe said. Robbie leaned forward to shift Gabe’s weight further onto his back.

Robbie felt the car spark up where it sat at the curb surrounded by an admiring pack. One boy who’d gotten a bit too close yelped and jumped backward, clutching his hand. A giddy surge from Eli. **Ha-ha! Got one!**

“How was math?” Robbie prodded, shooing the teenagers away and opening the passenger door with his mind. What the hell, Robbie figured, they made motorized door kits for hot rods.

“Awesome!” chorused the kids.

Robbie knelt and tipped Gabe down into the passenger seat where he slumped like a wet noodle. Gabe barely managed to lift his arms for Robbie to buckle him in.

Robbie ruffled Gabe’s hair, concerned. “How was math? Did Mrs. Jules get you better worksheets?”

“I dunno,” Gabe mumbled.

As the bulk of the teenagers dispersed, a new kid dashed up from behind the car. Robbie got an impression of him through the mirrors—black Mohawk starting to grow out on the sides, torn jeans scribbled with Sharpie and held together with safety pins, huge ears. Robbie'd never dared go full Punk like that—what would the social workers think. “Hey! Gabe! You alright, guey?”

Gabe straightened himself up with obvious effort. “Hey, Mateo.”

Mateo crowded close into the open passenger door, and Robbie looked back and forth between the strange teen and his brother, shrugged, and leaned aside so Gabe could talk to his…friend. Gabe had a friend at Robbie’s old middle school. _Robbie_ hadn't made any friends in middle school, at least none who'd proved to be worth keeping. “You looked all spaced out and sh—uh, stuff, in geology. Like you got low blood sugar or somethin’? You feelin’ any better?”

“It happens,” Gabe shrugged.

“What happened?” Robbie demanded. “JP, what’s he talking about? Gabe, buddy. You remember what we had for breakfast?”

Gabe rolled his eyes. “Oatmeal. Like always.”

“How about class, geology class. Do you remember what Mr. Cortez talked about?”

“Tectonic drift,” Mateo supplied.

“Yeah,” Gabe said, nodding.

“Kid, I’m trying to talk to my brother,” Robbie snapped.

Gabe reached up and poked him in the face. “Robbie, be nice!”

Robbie took a slow breath in and out through his nose. “You’re right. Mateo, I’m sorry. Gabe, do you remember what Mr. Cortez told you about tec—tectonic drift?”

“Earth’s crust…the tectonic plates move around.” Gabe’s voice trailed off and he stared out the window. “But I dunno what it’s for.”

Robbie racked his brain for everything he’d forgotten from eighth grade. “Did he talk about Pangea?”

Gabe looked up at him, hesitant. “Maybe?”

“Yeah,” said Mateo. “He did. He talked for, like, hours. You don’t remember that?”

“It happens,” Gabe said again.

“Yeah, it happens,” Robbie agreed. “We’ll stay up and watch cartoons tonight. Okay?”

Gabe perked up a fraction. “I wanna play Mario-Kart.”

“Yeah, you can beat me at Mario-Kart. I’m gonna talk to JP a second. You gonna be okay here?”

“Not a baby.”

“He’s gonna be okay?” Mateo demanded in a loud whisper. Across the parking lot, a woman was yelling for him.

“Yeah, he’ll be fine. Thanks for letting me know,” Robbie said.

Mateo leaned back in the open door, and thrust out his fist. “Hang in there, bro! See you Thursday!”

Gabe returned the fist-bump and Mateo ran off, the red soles of his sneakers flashing.

Robbie stood and walked up to JP. JP retreated a few steps, and Robbie advanced, until he’d herded Gabe’s learning aide all the way around to the opposite side of the Charger. “Why didn’t I hear this from you?”

JP swallowed and clutched Gabe’s backpack and crutches. “I'm just the teaching assistant. I'm not supposed to talk to parents directly about problems.”

Robbie's fist clenched and rose up without any conscious decision. He froze, shook his hand out, and lowered it deliberately back down. Breathed in and out, engine fumes faint in his nostrils. “You were with him all day?”

“A teacher—” JP swallowed. “A teacher's supposed to call you tonight to discuss any issues with learning—”

“I want to hear it now,” Robbie pressed. “Was he staring off into space? Twitching with his mouth?”

“Yeah, a little.”

“Slow to respond to questions?”

JP shrugged, backed up another step.

Robbie sidestepped around him and cornered him against the driver's side door. JP leaned away from him, back resting on the glass. “Did you even ask if he was okay? Did anyone take him to see the nurse?”

“I dunno,” JP said. His eyes were screwed shut and his head turned to the side. “Really, I dunno, man, Mr. Reyes, it's not my job, I just thought he was having a bad day.”

“How long did it last?”

“Wh-what?”

Robbie gritted his teeth. “ _The absence seizure._ How long did it last?”

“I dunno. I dunno. Mr. Reyes. I didn't know. I'm just the teaching aide.”

“ _Useless_.” JP wanted to teach kids. But he couldn't muster enough attentiveness to distinguish Gabe daydreaming from Gabe completely unresponsive. He stared up at JP's sweating face, and his fists shook.

He should kill him. He should mark him, or look him up online and follow him to school, to whatever bars or clubs he went to, to his home—wait for him to be alone. Then, bam. Lug wrench to the back of the head. JP would fall on his face, skin his knees through his khakis. Maybe he'd struggle up, stare up at his doom in horror or confusion, but by then he'd be too dazed to run, his vision blurred, unable to see the second strike coming. Then he'd haul him up, dump him in the trunk, and leave him there, let him thrash and cry and scrape at the steel shutting him in like a coffin, until he was ready to let JP out. Take him to some remote hilltop, like Northwick. JP would be dizzy, weak, confused. Unable to run, nowhere to run to. And there would be time to explain to him, in small words and practical demonstrations, exactly how badly JP had failed his responsibility. Time to extract the blood due for his failure to watch over Gabe.

**This twerp? _Really?_**

He stopped himself, rubbed his eye with the heel of his hand.

“I'm so sorry, Mr. Reyes, I didn't know what to look for,” JP choked, bending backwards against the car to get as far away from him as possible.

**Robbie Reyes, you little psychopath. The kid's in over his head, just trying to do his job. Lookit Gabe. He's fine.**

In the passenger seat, Gabe appeared to have dozed off, his head resting on his shoulder. Seizures always wiped him out, even the quiet ones that just happened inside his head—when they didn't cascade into more, stronger episodes. Robbie opened his mind to the car until he could feel him against the leather, pressing down springs and upholstery: no tremors, just slow, easy breaths. Sleep. _I'm not—I wasn't going to—_

 **Really? You're practically drooling for it. Our deal was we destroy, how did you phrase it, oh, yeah, '** _**people like you, Eli.** _ **' Not like poor JP here—but ridding the world of the weak-willed and stupid is also a noble goal...**

He backed up a step, giving JP a fake smile. “Tell Mr. Cortez I'm waiting for his call.” He reached for Gabe's bag and crutches, and JP flinched again like Robbie had brandished a knife. Robbie felt sick, and entirely unsympathetic. JP didn't deserve for Robbie to bludgeon him to death, but he didn't deserve to have his hand held, either. “If Gabe's not tracking, either he doesn't care, or something's wrong,” he ground out. “If you ever talked to him, you'd know the difference. I'm taking him home to watch for more seizures.” He popped the trunk and dropped Gabe's things in, then circled around to gently shut the passenger door and, as JP scuttled back toward the school, let himself in to the driver's seat and collapsed, gripping the wheel so hard his gloves creaked.

**I told you you'd get the taste for it.**

Robbie grunted and started the car. The rumble of the engine and whine of the supercharger roused Gabe, and he turned his head and looked over at Robbie muzzily. “Time for school?” he asked.

Robbie rubbed his eyes hard. “No, buddy. We're gonna go home and eat chicken soup, and then we're gonna stay up and play MarioKart.”

“Yay, chicken soup!” Gabe mumbled, sing-song. “Yay, MarioKart!” He shut his eyes and rested against the seatback again.

“Sounds fun, right?” Robbie said, pulling away from the curb. “Gabe?”

“I love you, Robbie,” Gabe breathed into the leather. He rubbed his elbows, sleepily, where they were sore from going on his crutches every day.

“Love you, too, Gabe.”

 

* * *

 

That night, they had soup and read the day's assignments together out of Gabe's textbooks and finished up with an article from Car and Driver and then settled in for a sleepless night of cheering Gabe on as he circled around and around a wooded island, racing against a pack of other Mario characters in go-karts. Used to be, they'd watch old Justice League cartoons on DVD over and over again all night; it had been so long since they'd last had to do this. This was the first seizure Gabe had had since getting on his new drugs over a year ago. Physically, he was doing great. Speech therapy was coming along, he could swallow firm textures comfortably and choking hadn't been a daily worry for years, plus people only had trouble understanding him anymore when he went off on an impromptu lecture about comics or vintage car engines. More strength and flexibility in his legs, enough to take some of the load off his arms, enough to get himself up and down from beds and chairs. If he angled his hand and gripped his pencil a certain way, he could write legibly, in letters as small as a third of an inch; with enough space on the worksheets, and enough time, he could complete quizzes and other small assignments in class without help. He worked hard, when his teachers interested him. He made friends easily. This was, for Gabe, as good as it was likely to get.

Robbie dozed on the couch and resisted the urge to get his laptop and check the news for updates on missing surgeons. At nine-thirty, the beep of an incoming text startled him alert; it was an address one freeway exit to the east. He remembered the arrangement he'd just made with the unknown number that afternoon. And he'd remembered how Nora had docked him last time he'd proven to be an unreliable shuttle service. He needed that cash.

“Uh, buddy,” he said, as Gabe hopped Bowser through a hoop and into a row of floating gold coins. “How'd you like to come with me on my new job?”

Gabe ignored him, guiding Bowser’s go-cart through a difficult series of jumps, tongue sticking out between his teeth. There had been no more seizures so far, and after food and a nap, he seemed to be tracking better.

“Gabe? Buddy?” Robbie pointed a finger at him and slowly advanced it toward Gabe’s elbow.

“Don’t _poke_ me,” Gabe protested when Robbie’s finger was a whole inch away from him. “I’m _concentrating._ ”

“When you finish this level, we should take a ride in our car. There’s some people who need me to drive them places. And I still need to watch you all night.”

“Not a baby,” said Gabe sourly.

Robbie sat very straight and folded his hands in his lap, like he did when he was talking to one of Gabe’s doctors or teachers whom he needed to impress. It got a half-smile out of Gabe. “No, you’re a big boy,” Robbie said. Back to sour again. “You’re a teenager. You’re in eighth grade, buddy! But it’s just like if I hurt my head really hard. I’d need you to stay up with me all night. Even grown-ups need someone to watch them after a seizure or something.”

Gabe successfully navigated a tightly twisting cliff-side road, shouldered other go-carts out of his way, and then plowed Bowser straight into the ocean. “O- _kay,_ ” he groaned. “Let’s go get some bread.”

Robbie’s mouth quirked. He was picking up all kinds of weird memes from the gen-ed kids.

He helped Gabe into the car, the back bench behind the driver’s seat this time, and followed the Google lady’s directions to a cramped apartment block in Montebello. He signed in to Uber and waited.

“Do your friends live here?” Gabe asked, leaning as far to the right as the lap belt would let him to stare out the opposite window.

“They’re not really _my_ friends—they’re friends of a friend. And they told me to meet them here.” Uber gave him a ping, “Salomé,” 4.7 stars. He looked up and down the street, saw a woman in a long camel-colored coat waving at him from the apartment’s stairwell. Accepted the ping. “Wait here, I’ve got to let them in,” he said, leaning across the cabin to unlock the passenger door by hand. He got out, scuffed his sneakers on the gritty concrete. Gave Gabe a final thumbs-up, shut the door, and met the woman at the curb. Two other women joined her.

Salomé, he’d already met: she was the woman who’d been hit in the head the night Robbie had driven her and Nora to the house party. She was average-height, with a stick-up mane of razored bleach-blonde hair and aggressive smears of black eyeshadow around her dark brown eyes, and little else for makeup. Her partners, like Salomé, had dressed for plausible deniability: spike heeled pumps, a black skirt-suit, a long black swing coat. They looked like they were headed to an orchestral concert, just three friends taking a night out.

“Salomé?” Robbie asked. “I’m Eliot.”

“I remember,” said Salomé. “Not gonna forget that car.”

“That’s him?” the girl in the swing coat asked. “Seriously, _he’s_ the guy who messed up Craig Lambert?”

Robbie squinted at her. Lambert? Sounded like a white guy. There weren’t that many of those in Ghost Rider’s territory. The last white guy he’d beat on had been Alex Northwick. But she shouldn’t know—had Nora known about the Rider? Figured it out like Guero had? Was he that obvious?

“Yeah, that’s him.” Salomé gave a small sharp smile. “Real talk, Eliot. Nora had her whole list of rules, but you’re dealing with me now. You provide additional security, put the scare on someone who messes with us, and we’ll work something out. Little bonus.”

“Uh,” Robbie said.

**You’re moving up in the world, kid! This is pimping!**

A memory flicked forward in his brain. The last time an odious person had called him a pimp. The name on the driver’s license he’d found after unexpectedly teleporting into the police evidence locker—Pink Shorts. Salomé didn’t know anything about Ghost Rider. “I didn’t do anything to Craig Lambert.”

“Act surprised if you want anyone to believe that.”

“It wasn’t me.” It was Nora, it had to be. But if Nora hadn’t gotten there first, it would have been him.

“Yeah, sure. Your protection won’t go uncompensated. Let’s stick with that.”

It was a good deal. It had been a sick feeling, storming Pink Shorts’ house to find Nora and her partners—to find what the men had done. A sick feeling later, to wonder if the men would have refrained, got their rocks off in orderly lines and let Nora and her friends depart at two hours on the dot with a tip and a civil handshake, if Robbie had stood guard in the corner with a crowbar. And money, Robbie would do almost anything for money.

That was the problem.

“I won’t hurt people for money,” Robbie said.

**You'll hurt people for free.**

He would. God, but he would. He would stand in the corner of the room with his eyes averted, or wait in the car with the window cracked, and if one of the women called for him, he would come running: not because he cared particularly for Salomé, but because he wanted the hot thrill of bursting into a battered motel room stinking of sin, seeing the mood change as all eyes fixed on him and his hammer. Everyone feared the Ghost Rider, but he could make them fear Robbie. He could let his rage burn his world clean. Give the johns the pain they'd earned by their selfishness and indifference, strike out with swift, precise blows that flung blood sweet and hot against his face.

He lowered his head and clenched his fists at his sides. This fantasy didn't belong to Eli. It was Robbie's. He was a killer now. Whether through contagion or genetics or fate or his own weak will, hatred threaded roots deep through him. Cut out one violent urge, and a dozen more emerged the next day, shadowing his mind. Perhaps he should let it happen. Was it wrong to punish those who hurt people? Was it wrong to be eager for it?

“If you need help,” Robbie said, hoarse, “I'll help you. No strings. Just try not to need me to.” He put his hand on the passenger door handle. “My brother's in the car. He doesn't know anything about this. Don't curse around him.”

“Well, fuck me right in the pussy. I guess I'd better shit now while I got the chance,” Salomé said. The woman in the swing coat sniggered and bent double. “What's he doing here? You didn't mention any other passengers.”

“Health stuff. Just came up. I'm keeping an eye on him.” He saw Salomé tighten her jaw, probably biting back another sarcastic remark—which Robbie had, admittedly, earned. “Please don't tell him I said that.”

“Whatever, dude,” Salomé said. Robbie opened the door and flipped down the passenger bucket seat for Salomé’s partners to get in.

“Hello!” Gabe called from the back bench.

“Gabe, these are my passengers. I’m going to drive them around to meet people.”

“Yeah, ‘meet people,’ nice,” Salomé said. The woman in the skirt-suit took off her pumps and clambered into the back seat, her partner in the swing coat following.

“My name’s Gabe Reyes, what’s your name?”

“Um. MacKenzie,” the woman in the suit said.

Gabe bounced in his seat and grabbed the back of the driver’s seat for balance. “Hello, MacKenzie!”

The woman in the swing coat piled in next, introduced herself in kind, talking-to-children tones. “Hello, Gabe. My name is Ramada. Is this your brother?”

“Yeah! This is Robbie! He’s the coolest! This is our car, it’s the coolest, it produces _so much torque!_ ”

Salomé cast a sharp look into the shadows of the car, before flipping the front seat back and buckling in. “Robbie, huh?”

Robbie shrugged, shut the door, circled around, and started the car. “Nickname.”

“Whatever,” Salomé said.

They headed off, a short freeway hop westbound. Gabe explained how a supercharger works as they drove through clean-swept, brightly-lit streets in L.A. proper. While the women disappeared into Hyatts and townhouses, Robbie turned on the cabin light so he could read aloud passages from Gabe’s American History textbook, reviewing content from the past two weeks in case Gabe had forgotten it in the seizure. He gave up half-way through. He couldn’t make himself explain slavery to his little brother, who loved people and thought the best of almost everyone.

He dug Gabe’s knock-off Iron Man figure out of the glove box, passed it back and leaned against the door, watching the back seat over his shoulder. “Tell me a story, buddy?”

Gabe seized Iron Man, eager to escape the drudgery of memorizing the meaningless dates of despicable actions by dead people who didn’t even wear Spandex or shoot lasers out of their hands. “Iron Man!” He snapped down the figure's little helmet, folded the arms down to the waist, flying position. “He goes back into history, eeeeroooom,” a rapid swoop up and down through the confines of the car. The top of Robbie’s headrest marked the location of the wormhole. “He’s in history now, Robbie! He goes back, he goes to Harper’s Ferry, he helps John Brown. He says, ‘John Brown, you need help. Let me help or you go to jail and die.’ And John says okay.”

Iron Man swooped back and forth over the back bench seat, repulsors firing: “Pshew! Pshew!”

“And Iron Man and John Brown take over the _whole armory._ And John Brown's friends help, too, and Ninja Wolf beats the bad guys all by himself because they're history people and they don't know Ninjitsu. And Ninja Wolf's Best Friend is there, too. They beat all the bad guys, and they free all the slaves, and Ninja Wolf's Best Friend drives everyone to Canada in his car! He drives almost a million times because there's millions of slaves and it's not safe to ride on the outside of a car, Robbie!”

Robbie watched him through the gap in the headrest as Gabe sent Iron Man looping through the air and wove a brighter history out of memory and imagination. His little brother was tougher than Robbie gave him credit for.

Gabe had no more seizures, and finally fell asleep while Salomé and her partners were working in a sprawling Pueblo-style house in a neighborhood very similar to the one where Robbie had come in to rescue her, Nora, and Estrella. Robbie had an hour and fifteen minutes' time limit, and tacit permission to come in swinging if they weren't out the door by then. This suited Eli. Robbie contemplated lighting up the car and getting Eli to teleport them home so he could put Gabe to bed first, if that happened.

If Salomé missed her exit time, Robbie wasn't sure he'd be able to pull himself out of the Rider before he went in after them.

He got an email notification on his phone at midnight. It was from the California Board of Education. His GED had been scored.

Gabe snored lightly against the window. Robbie took a deep breath to settle his nerves and tapped on the header. Saw the message open with the California seal and below it, his eyes snapped to the word, “Congratulations.”

His breath left him in a shuddering huff and clutched the phone to his chest, weeks of anxiety thawing under a heady wash of relief and satisfaction. He fought the urge to shake Gabe awake and pumped his fist silently. _I did it. I did it! I'm done, I made it!_ He scrolled down to his scores, a little grid. Reasoning Through Language Arts, Mathematical Reasoning, Social Studies, Science. Passing was 145-200, and he had two 180's and a 190, plus a 170 in Social Studies that was likely down to differences of opinion. 180 was...college-ready, with credit. Not only had he done it, he'd done it well.

All that work, all that time. He'd beat the system. Paid his bills, taken care of his brother, completed high-school seven months ahead of schedule, and—and he'd scored 730 out of 800. 90th percentile. Top 10% class rank if he'd stayed. He was good at this, he was smart; he remembered the heady satisfaction of pulling character-driven textual analysis on Shakespeare plays out of thin air in English class, the hms and scribbles from his classmates, the satisfied nod from Mr. Wakeford. He grinned to himself in the privacy of the car. He turned the phone sideways and zoomed in on the little grid. He thought of texting Lisa. He might even show Salomé.

 **Like anyone's gonna look at that piece of paper and think anything but “gutter-rat couldn't hack normal school,”** Eli interrupted. **You're dreaming if you think you can pay Gabbie's bills forever fixing cars. Or that you could afford night school. Sitters. Interest payments. Heh.**

_Fuck. Off. I'm going to automotive school. I can **do** this. I'm good at this. Master mechanics make good money, and I could branch out and get more certifications._

**Yeah, and you'll work where? Who in this shithole is supposed to hire you in three years?**

Robbie switched to his browser and looked up some job postings. There were plenty, Los Angeles was a big place, but none for master mechanics, not in East LA. **Slim pickings, boy. You'll have to commute. The traffic, the uncertainty—who's picking up Gabbie from school, or meeting him at the bus? You could be thirty minutes late, could be two hours. What sitter will tolerate that? You've played on Mrs. Valenzuela's heartstrings long enough. Sooner or later she'll get sick of you, and even little mister sunshine back there—you know, I think he may be learning sarcasm from the normies? So now you're left with amateur sitters. Like, oh, Lisa. That worked out well—best-case scenario, he gives her the slip and jumps off a high-rise. Or some whore who'll shoot up the moment you leave, confident that little Gabbie won't tattle on her.**

 _I'll figure something out._ Robbie ground his teeth. _That's years away._

**Time flies. You notice this as you get older. No, what you need to do, kid, is move to where the jobs are. And you're just where you were when I brought you back: you need fifty thousand dollars. Maybe not now, but someday. That day will come. If you don't have your seed money, your downpayment, you'll be stuck scrounging in the margins. Gabbie has a bad week, it'll wipe out your savings and you won't catch back up. You're trapped, Robbie, and you're too proud to take the obvious way out.**

_What?_

**You keep pushing off this conversation and I'm sick of it. Believe it or not, I care about you boys, and I don't want a front row seat to your misery.**

“You _care—_ ” Robbie hissed, checked the backseat over his shoulder. Gabe slept on. _You care? That's seriously what you're going with?_

**Of course I care, you ungrateful brat. You're blood. Both of you. Last piece I got of my own damn brother.**

**Robbie, when you refuse to take the stick out of your puckered virgin ass, you mortgage Gabriel's future for your pride. You're spinning your wheels playing taxi driver. You need serious coin, and you know how to get it.**

_No._

**Yes, you do. Heh. You just don't want to say it, don't want to think it. So, continuing this conversation that you do not want to have—what was so different about Alex Northwick? Really. He killed an innocent person. Yeah, dime a dozen. You got that hot little jump from your psychometry, though. You've never fought anyone that you've known the victim, have you? You don't try, you won't even look at those little roadside candle shrines that keep popping up whenever the gangs get twitchy.**

**And you don't regret killing him.**

Robbie stared down at his phone for a long time, lead hardening in his guts. Slowly, he shook his head.

**I know you don't. So. Northwick killed an innocent person. Open the classifieds, every single page there's a contract on some fucker who's killed five, ten, two dozen innocent people—or if not innocent, enough people that put together they'd have enough good bits for one pure soul. You say those dead don't deserve our justice, Robbie? Just because you'd be paid for it? What, you think you're on some slippery slope?**

_I know I'm not. I'm in control. Killing Northwick didn't make me lose control and he deserved it for what he did. But I don't want to do it again. Especially for money._

**We all gotta do things we don't want to, Robbie,** Eli scolded. **But you're right. _You_ don't have to. The Rider could do it.**

_What?_

**You've noticed you're not really you, Robbie Reyes, when we burn up—the Rider, it's something else. It's you, me, and the car. If you let the Rider do some dirty work, that don't say nothin' ugly about you. You just...have a problem, and you know someone who'll help. If you'll let 'em.**

_I don't want to talk about this anymore._

To distract himself, Robbie logged onto his VPN. Pulled up DuckDuckGo and searched for Alex Northwick, latest first. There'd been a string of articles about Northwick's disappearance, all with one of the same two pictures of the damaged Lotus; writers leaned on the "handsome surgeon crashes super-car" angle. Last he'd seen, the hospital was welcoming a new trauma surgeon, some lady from Tallahassee.

There was a new article up this week. It was from one of those little article-compiler-clickbait websites. “Hospital Robbery Masterminded By Missing Doctor,” and within the abbreviated article, a link back to the original investigation by Buzzfeed.

Someone had connected Robbie's visit to the security office with anomalous key-card logs for Alex Northwick.

Robbie squinted at his phone and scrolled slowly.

 

Robbery or Coverup? Stolen Hospital Footage Linked To Missing Surgeon

Our investigation links missing surgeon Alexander Northwick to an armed robbery committed at East Los Angeles Medical Center before his disappearance.

On September 27, 2016, an armed man broke into East LA MC, held security personnel at gunpoint, and demanded the stored hard-copies of internal surveillance footage from March 11 and 12, 2016. He was never detected entering or exiting the hospital, despite being shot in a confrontation with security personnel. No gunshot victim matching his description was observed seeking care after the incident, and no arrests have been made. The highly specific target of the robbery, the successful escape, and the apparent unsophistication of the perpetrator suggest the robbery was committed with inside help.

A 27-year-old Los Angeles woman, Candace Gutierrez, died on the night of March 11 or the morning of March 12, 2016. Her body was examined early in the morning of March 12 at East LA MC. Logs of personnel badge use showed Dr. Northwick's badge being used to access the hospital early in the morning on March 12. Dr. Northwick had no shift scheduled on that date. Because the sole copy of the hospital security camera footage on that date was stolen, it is not known what Dr. Northwick was doing in the hospital at that time.

The East LA coroner disputes the authenticity of the coroner's report. The death certificate describes the cause of death as a vehicular accident, but no accident report was filed and the certificate did not detail the circumstances of her death.

Candace Gutierrez' sister, Iris Gutierrez-Bao, requested the death certificate and the signed release of the body from East LA MC and shared them with Buzzfeed.

“I never signed this document,” Iris asserts. “Someone forged our mother's signature and mine. We never came to the hospital to identify Candace's body. We learned she was dead on March 18, but we were never officially notified.”

_This photo compares Esther Gutierrez's own signed first name with the signed first name on the release of the body. Note the widely differing letter forms on the release document, and the tremor distorting the authentic signature. Source: Iris Gutierrez-Bao_

The hospital has not released the medical examination report to the family and the East LA MC medical examiner could not be reached for comment. East LA MC asserts that all proper procedures for notification of the family were followed. Requests to produce documentation of contact with the family have received no response.

At the time of her death, Candace Gutierrez had been engaged to Dr. Northwick. Ms. Gutierrez-Bao claims that Candace endured emotional and physical abuse at the hands of her fiance.

_Candace Gutierrez and Dr. Alexander Northwick, Christmas, 2015. Source: Facebook_

Dr. Northwick has been missing since November 23 when his car was found wrecked and abandoned near his La Tuna Canyon home. An investigation into the disappearance is ongoing.

“I think about my sister every day,” Ms. Gutierrez-Bao says. “I'll think about her every day for the rest of my life. She was a brilliant person, a truly kind, generous person, with a great sense of humor and a genuine love for people. I still meet people who remember her and care about her. I think if she were still alive, the world would be a brighter place. She made people want to be their best self.”

When asked if she suspected foul play, in light of the irregularities in the documents pertaining to Candace Gutierrez's death, Ms. Gutierrez-Bao was unequivocal. “Yes. But because her body is gone, it's been months after her death, the tapes from the hospital are gone, and Alex is gone, I don't think we'll ever have proof. I had already complained to the East Los Angeles Police Department about my suspicions about Alex's behavior and about the hospital's failure to notify us on the morning of Candace's death. There are many parties at fault here, that are making it difficult to get justice.”

When asked if she knew anything about Dr. Northwick's disappearance, Ms. Gutierrez-Bao denied it. “I think he's still out there,” she said. “I think he got scared and ran and he's somewhere in Acapulco.”

A doctor enjoys unique access and trust. While this reporter will not venture to claim that the theft of hospital security footage, the irregular documentation of Ms. Gutierrez's body, and the unscheduled visit of Dr. Northwick to the hospital on the night of her death are connected, the coincidence raises new questions about the reasons behind Dr. Northwick's disappearance.

East LA PD had no comment when asked about the possibility of opening an investigation into Candace Gutierrez's death. Ms. Gutierrez-Bao has filed a civil suit against Dr. Northwick claiming damages of three million dollars for wrongful death on behalf of Candace Gutierrez. If Dr. Northwick does not reappear within two years, the suit will proceed against his estate.

_Go, Iris,_ Robbie thought. Northwick's disappearance was enough to break the indifference of the press. Maybe the police would show interest now, too, and then Candace could have real justice, public justice. He'd taken that away from her family when he'd killed Northwick. The vengeance he'd given for Candace was woefully inadequate, too short, too private, stolen and wasted. _They need the disks back._

**Don't you dare.**

He peered back around the armrest at Gabe, Iron Man cradled in his lap, breath fogging the window.

No. He wouldn't dare.

Doing the right thing wasn't worth losing Gabe.

 


	7. Evil are the things thou profferest.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Robbie tries to get help for his anger. Then he demonstrates how much he needs help for his anger.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More graphic violence in this chapter. Robbie almost kills someone. (Not at church.)
> 
> Big thank-you to [heeeymackelena](https://archiveofourown.org/users/heeeymackelena/pseuds/heeeymackelena) for help with Roman Catholic practices, especially the parts with the medallions. All errors are my own. To get myself some wiggle-room, I'm envisioning this church as kind of a casual, store-front, family-oriented, hip new church that focuses on outreach and community service.

Seven PM on a Wednesday and Robbie should be home, or taking fares. He’d texted Lisa, and she was watching Gabe for him—twelve dollars an hour, he’d offered, feeling awkward about the situation with the cookies, and she’d left him on read for half the day before accepting. So Gabe was at home, watching a Pixar movie with Lisa, and Robbie was in Boyle Heights, parking the Charger in front of a storefront advertising clothing alterations and bail-bonds, on the same block as another storefront duplex half painted deep blue, Alcohólicos Anónimos, and the other half bright yellow, Our Father’s House.

Our Father’s House had a glass push-door with an old-fashioned bell hung above the hinge. Robbie froze and checked in front and behind him at the noise.

The atrium smelled like new paint, cinnamon, perfume and cologne, and, deep under the other layers, old carpet. Hand-sewn lace curtains decorated the front window. There was a little desk with an old computer setup, and behind the desk, a narrow hallway. Robbie looked down the hall and saw rows and rows of chairs.

The Virgin Mary watched him benignly, a painted terra-cotta relief hanging behind the desk. He wasn’t sure which Mary. Not the Virgin of Guadalupe. Another Mary. She held Baby Jesus in one arm and a scepter in the other.

“Someone there?” a man called in Spanish, from deep within the building.

“Yes, I came for the…the group,” Robbie replied.

“Come in, before the cookies are gone,” the man said.

Robbie crept down the short hallway into a makeshift sanctuary in what had once been a workshop or storeroom. A dozen rows of folding chairs with an aisle cleared down the middle, and a low platform against the back wall with a battered podium and a projector screen. He paused in the doorway. Just beside his elbow, screwed into the wall, was a little porcelain font with yet another Mary, and about two cups of clean water. Her face and clothes were gaily but clumsily painted, probably by a child.

Slowly, hesitantly, Robbie reached out.

Eli tensed in the back of his head, then dug into his arm and shoulder, numbing and cramping. His arm froze in mid-air, stiff like he'd brushed a live wire. Robbie clenched his teeth, breathed hard, and grabbed his wrist with his other hand. Now Eli was tugging on both his arms, but it was harder to fight over two limbs at once, and Eli forgot entirely about Robbie's feet. He lurched forward, crashed into the wall, and splashed his right hand into the holy water.

The water didn’t boil, he wasn’t burned or shocked, lightening didn’t strike him, avenging angels didn’t appear. Eli settled under his skin.

**Heh-heh. Just messin' with ya.**

Robbie wasn't convinced. He crossed himself, clumsy because he hadn’t done it since he was little; all he felt was the cool water evaporating from his hand and forehead. He didn’t know if he was relieved or disappointed. His throat hurt.

He straightened his back, crossed the threshold, and turned the corner. A little circle of a half-dozen people of various ages sat on folding chairs, next to a card table spread with two near-empty paper packs of Conchitas and a coffee pot.

“Help yourself,” said the man who had spoken. He was maybe ten years older than Robbie, tall, heavyset, with a patchy mustache and a kind expression. “I’m Ignacio, everyone calls me Nacho. Welcome.”

“Thank-you, sir,” Robbie said. He turned his back on the little group and helped himself to a paper cup of coffee and a few cookies on a paper towel, then looked around, picked up a folding chair, and sat down. The other members scooted their chairs away to make room for him. He bounced his knee and sipped the weak coffee.

The woman beside Robbie, Nacho, and the man next to Nacho had rosaries in their hands or hanging out of their pockets. Should Robbie have a rosary? He'd lost his, years ago. He'd expected a trauma and bereavement support group, not a prayer meeting.

“Good evening, young man,” the woman next to him said. Her Spanish had an accent, slow and soft. Her face was lined and her hair streaked with white, but something about her made Robbie think these were premature, that she couldn't be more than forty.

“Good evening, ma'am.” He stuffed an entire cookie into his mouth and washed it down with a gulp of coffee.

Nacho smiled again. “While we're waiting for anyone else to arrive—hey, good news. Pueblos Unidos.”

A younger woman, sitting stiffly upright in her chair, raised her coffee cup in acknowledgment.

“Yeah, Maria. Good times, right? We just finished renovating the library study room for Boyle Heights Middle School, repainted it, stripped and sealed the floors, and moved in donated chairs and tables. Lopez and Sons carpentry donated their time to build the kids some more shelves. Hector, such a great guy. And Juliana refurbished three laptops, put this neat free Photoshop on them. Tons of new people, volunteers from all walks of life, the kids were dee-jaying.”

“Murals,” said Maria.

“Yeah, oh, yeah, Mrs. Komorov's art class. Talented, clever kids. They drew this gorgeous surreal cityscape, projected it on the wall, filled the whole thing in in two hours flat, just twenty students working together. Guys, it's so humbling to watch, this little project my cousin started, it's grown so much and done so much good all through this city, and it shows that God loves this community, that He works through His people to heal this community.”

Robbie had gone on a Pueblos Unidos project last year, sprucing up a homeless shelter with a busload of his classmates. His English teacher had arranged it and gotten the school board to sign off on counting it as extra credit. Robbie had gotten paint all over his clothes and, armed with a crusty old paint brush and off-brand masking tape, done what in his own opinion was a piss-poor job of touching up all the molding; still, the manager of the shelter had seemed pleased. “I didn't know it was...holy,” he said. He stared down at the cookies resting on his thigh. He wasn't used to so much straight Spanish. It made him think of his mother, when she and his father had used to take him and Gabe to mass; it made him feel warm, but also small. He spoke it, but he wasn't _well-spoken_ in Spanish. He wasn't educated in it. He didn't know how to impress social workers in it. Too much of what he knew was not the Spanish that nice people spoke.

“My aunt's agnostic,” Nacho said. “But, 'by their fruits you shall know them,' and her work bears good fruit.”

 _I guess,_ Robbie thought. He tapped his foot and finished his chonchitas as they waited. He wadded up the paper towel into his paper cup and set them under his chair, resisting the urge to pull out his phone.

“It was good to see the kids,” Maria said abruptly. The others hm'd in agreement.

Seven-ten ticked past, and Nacho leaned forward, clasping his hands. “We've got some new faces tonight, so let's go around the circle and introduce ourselves. I'm Ignacio DosSantos, I'm a deacon at Our Father's House and a mental health counselor. First names are fine, doesn't have to be your legal name, and a little about yourself and how you got here.”

Just clockwise to Nacho, a short man in his twenties or thirties hunched in his seat. “I'm Javier. I have two daughters. I come here and I go to mass because I can't leave them or disappoint them again.”

The introductions continued. The prematurely gray woman on Robbie's right was Emely; she also had two daughters, and a son. Robbie introduced himself: “I'm a mechanic. I found this meeting on the Internet. I have...emotional problems.” Maria, the woman who sat stiffly upright, had served in the Army in Afghanistan, and she had PTSD that the VA didn't cover because the events that caused it were before she'd enlisted. The youngest participant after Robbie was a tall young man named Tony. “I was best friends with Emmanuel Grocer,” Tony said. Small world: Emmanuel Grocer was a student who'd died in a drive-by just two blocks from Robbie's high school.

After the introductions, Nacho clasped his hands. “Tonight, I'm going to pray for the intercession of Mary, Help of Christians, for the Lord's blessing and comfort during this meeting. You may close your eyes or keep them open, as you wish.”

He prayed: old, elegant words, a rhythm that called up echoes from forgotten streets in Robbie's memory. “We beg your patronage, holy Mother of God; please hear our petitions for your wisdom, your love, and the necessities of life, and deliver us from all danger, O glorious and blessed Virgin. Amen.” They sat in silence for half a minute, then Nacho rubbed his hands together and stood. “Anyone not have a rosary? Here, borrow some. I know it gets awkward sitting around thinking of something to say; you can pray it while you listen or you can just fidget with your hands. Here.” He stepped to a cupboard next to the card table and got out a little wicker basket full of rainbow-colored rosaries strung together from plastic beads and laces. Tony and Robbie each took one. Robbie looked down at the beads in his hands, so unlike his mother's beads of turquoise and silver. There was a little tin crucifix and a large bead made of wood, and the spacing was uneven between the rest. The plastic lace it was strung on was translucent pink, with sparkles. “This week, I'd like you all to meditate on a quote from everyone's second-favorite saint, Anthony of Padua.”

Nacho cleared his throat. “'We are formed by environment and grace, by politics and prayer, by church and conscience. All God's creatures conspire to teach us as well. We stumble. We stutter. We rise. We are lifted.' I love this quote. Just goes to show, no person is an island. We are all influenced by those around us, and by our kindness, even the smallest acts, we have the power to strengthen and uplift others in turn. Remember anytime you feel weak and powerless: with just a smile or a kind word you can help another person feel loved, even just for a little moment. Life's made of little moments.” He leaned back in his chair again. “Okay. Go ahead, share what you feel is important, anything troubling you, anything you're proud of. And everyone else, just listen. At the end of the hour, we'll say another prayer for special intercession. New guys, this isn't a time to go try to fix anyone else's life, or make beef with anyone, or call the cops. If you want help from anyone else here, you can work it out yourselves, right? Alright.” He looked to his left. “Javier, you're in the hot seat. How've you been?”

Javier, the anxious man with the rosary and two daughters, hunched forward, beads rattling in his hands. He opened his mouth and paused, lips pale, eyes bloodshot with exhaustion. “I'm on borrowed time, Nacho. They're coming for me—my sins—the things I did on the inside, I still owe for them. I'm not walking away from this. I hurt people, I shed blood—”

Robbie's eyes snapped up. He had a creased, anxious face and a compact, muscular build; head wasn't shaved, but peeking out under the collar of his shirt was a tattoo, a plain dark corner of a line. It was crooked. Amateur work. He'd been in prison. He was an ex-con. Not even six feet away, sitting in a prayer meeting, fidgeting with his beads. And he was here—for what? Forgiveness? To feel better about the people he'd hurt?

Nacho clasped him on the shoulder. “Hey, hey. Javier. Where's this coming from? Did someone come after you?”

Javier shook his head, reached into his inside coat pocket for a little bible with notes sticking out every dozen pages. “Ezekiel,” he mumbled, opening it along one of the bookmarks. “It says. 'Therefore, as I live, declares the Lord God, I will prepare you for blood, and blood shall pursue you; because you did not hate bloodshed, therefore blood shall pursue you.' I...the things I did, I'm responsible. They're still in me. They won't let me go.”

Robbie felt an electric shiver run from the crown of his head to his toes. He gazed at Javier, imprinting the details of his appearance into his mind: one knobby ear, dusty work boots, wrist-watch held together with a bit of wire, wedding ring on a chain around his neck. He had a mole on his cheek, and he wore a pungent old-fashioned aftershave that failed to disguise his acrid fear-sweat, and one of his teeth was chipped. He had no accent—a Los Angeles native. They would leave this makeshift church inside an hour, and Robbie could watch him get in his car, follow him. **That's us, kid. That's our purpose. He shed blood, and we're the bloodshed gonna strike him down.**

Robbie couldn't think of anything to counter that except that it was highly suspect for Eli to weigh in on matters of morality. He rubbed the heel of his palm hard into his eye. Counted his rosary beads. Silently recited a different engine's cylinder-head nut tightening sequence at every bead, because he was drawing a complete blank on the Hail Mary.

“Hey, hey, hey,” Nacho was saying, rubbing Javier's back. “How long's this been on your mind? All week? Buddy, you gotta give Ezekiel a break. You know who I think you should look to, until mass? I want you to read on the life of St. Paul. You feel guilty, right?”

“Guilt doesn't absolve what I've done,” Javier choked out.

_**No shit.** _

“You feel real guilty. How do you know? Because you found that passage, and you felt it, right here,” Nacho said, tapping Javier over the heart. “You feel guilt because you _do_ hate bloodshed, and you're afraid because you're making a hard choice to disobey orders and not repeat these sins you regret so much. Okay? Do you believe me?”

Javier made an ambiguous head-waggle.

“You're gonna meditate on the life of St. Paul, can you do that for me?”

Javier nodded.

“You want a hug?”

He shrugged. Nacho wrapped his arm around Javier's shoulders and gave him a long squeeze.

_**He better not try that on us.** _

They went around the circle. Robbie kept Javier in the corner of his eye.

Emely on Robbie's right: “My daughter had her quinceañera on Saturday.” Congratulations from everyone. “Thank-you. She just loved her party. I couldn't afford much, but her brother pitched in, bless him, and we had a cake, and I made a tiara with paste-flowers for her like my grandmother taught me—but I'm so scared, so, so scared, I had to leave half-way through. She's nearly the age that I was when I met my first husband, and I am so fearful for her, she's just a child, she doesn't know how people are, how evil they can be...”

Robbie passed his turn.

Maria on Robbie's left: “Nothing much to update. I had a quiet week. Checked up on my father. He's on dialysis now. Can hardly walk across a room. I'm trying not to feel happy, I know I should have compassion for him. But. He wouldn't want it if I had it.” She rubbed a medallion on her wrist: a cross in a circle, with letters around it. “I've been keeping my demons away. Couple near slips.”

Robbie squinted at her medallion. His mother had given him that very same one after his first communion: a silver pendant. She'd told him it was for protection from evil. She'd always emphasized that kind of thing: which Saints to call on, making sure he knew to cross himself and kneel before he entered the pews, making them sit near the center aisle at baptisms so they'd be near the priest when he walked past and sprinkled everyone with holy water. At one time, he'd have called it superstition. Now, he had to wonder if she'd been on to something.

He'd lost that medallion in a group home, like his rosary. Mrs. Campos, the nosy old lady who barged into all the group homes a couple times a year to give the kids candy and harass the foster parents, had given him a St. Anthony medallion for good luck to help him look for it. It was light and shiny and made of aluminum. Robbie never did lose that one, but it was in his desk at home where he kept his stamps. He'd never reached for St. Anthony for comfort. He'd wanted his real medallion.

As the turn passed around to the man after Maria, and then to Tony, Robbie started to panic. What was he going to say? He didn't belong here. He had a pretty good life. He didn't have anxiety or insomnia. He hadn't been stalked, or been to war, or gotten addicted to heroin, or been recruited by a prison gang. He'd literally been murdered, yes, but it hadn't stuck. All his real problems, he couldn't figure out a single plausible analogy to what was actually going on that wouldn't get him arrested or institutionalized.

_I got chased by cops. Or gang-bangers. They shot me in the head and I almost died. Now I hear a voice that tells me to kill. It's harder to control my anger. Sometimes I think I’m a monster, and when I'm like that, I can't be around my little brother. I want to stalk and...hurt people, who haven’t done anything to me. At first it was people who hurt other people, but now it's anyone who pisses me off. Sometimes I feel like someone else takes over my body. And I get the shakes when I hear helicopters now._

**You’re the only sane man in a world gone mad. You burn with Biblical anger. You are God’s fiery judgment on the Gomorrah around you.**

“I had a dream that cut me open again,” Tony said. He rubbed his plastic beads purposelessly between his finger and thumb. “Me and Emmanuel were playing ball. Doubles, out in the street, with the neighbors like when we were kids. And we were doing good, Manny was making trick shots, dribbling through his legs, all that, and I got in this argument with the other guys, they said his shots don't count because he's a ghost. And I laughed and I was like, haven't you seen _Air Bud_? There's no rule says a ghost can't play basketball, fools—and then it was like it hit me again. We kept playing, but I felt sick, I didn't know why Manuel and the guys were just cool with him being dead, and I couldn't ask, in the dream, you know? 'Cause it'd be rude. And I woke up, still feeling sick. Been smoking up ever since to keep my head straight. I know I shouldn't. But I can't be breaking down at work.” He looked slantwise at Nacho, defensive. “I've been saying the novenas. But I need chemical help, too.”

Nacho raised his hands, palms out. “We're here for comfort, not judgment.”

“Not a lot of comfort,” Tony whispered. “He's dead. He wasn't innocent, I mean, he could be a real dick, and he sold term papers and pirated DVDs. But he didn't deserve to be _shot,_ and—and don't tell me he's with the saints, Nacho, just don't. Don't. They loaded him on a gurney, they took him away, he was making this gurgling noise—he died afraid and in pain. I failed him. I didn't make them let me go with him in the ambulance. And I didn't track down the bangers who did it.”

“Tony,” said Nacho softly.

“It's too late, anyway,” Tony muttered. “Even if I did want to. To get justice. No way anyone remembers—names, dates. Who it was they meant to shoot at. Probably in prison for something else by now.”

**Not too late for us, Robbie.**

Robbie gripped his rosary, feeling the plastic laces stretch. He remembered seeing the street blocked off the day Emmanuel died; he'd noticed the squad cars and ambulances out of the corner of his eye, kept his head down, headed for the group home. Then the next day after lunch, the principal had announced a memorial in the gym next Friday. The schools around here had a whole protocol for that kind of thing.

He couldn't waste time on old memories; he had to focus. He needed to come up with a story. _I help my uncle with his job. He...he's a PI, he finds people, but he hurts them, too. I helped find this guy...a real asshole, he hurt someone bad. I got so angry. I wanted him to suffer. So we...destroyed him. I helped my uncle destroy his life. And he deserved it. But the people he hurt, they're never going to get justice after what we did. And now my uncle wants me to work for him full-time. And I'm scared I can't see the line of who deserves to be hurt like that anymore._

**Don't make things complicated. Lookit this Tony kid, he's broken. Only one way to stop the animals who did this from continuing the carnage: put 'em in the ground. Blood follows blood.**

Tony spoke again, looking down at his knees. “And I know whoever did it—they were probably out for revenge, too. Losing people does that to you. Even if I did find them, it'd just end in more violence.”

“That's very wise, Tony,” Nacho said.

Tony shrugged.

**Not us, we don't have to play by those rules, Robbie.**

_Forget prison, we've probably already kicked his face in and we wouldn't know._

**But what if we didn't. Fifty-fifty, the banger who did it is still out there, and if _we_ kill him, there'll be no damn body to avenge. The “cycle of violence” comes to a fiery end. This Tony kid wouldn't have the stomach to do what we do, anyway. You, now—you stalked Northwick and ended him like a goddamn professional. This is the outlet for your sadism, Robbie. Vengeance. _Justice._ Slaughter the guys who killed that poor Emmanuel kid, instead of some hapless teacher's aide just trying to do his job. **

_I didn't mean it—I wasn't going to—_

**How would you know? _I_ had to talk you down. **

Tony was done talking. The guy next to him talked about his wife, who'd died of cancer six months ago. That was the last person in the circle, and the end of the hour was getting close, and Robbie still needed help. Something, anything—a meditation exercise to calm himself, a word of mental-health-counselor wisdom, a code of conduct. But he'd had forty minutes to come up with a plausible story and it wasn't coming.

_People think they can just do whatever they want. There was this big kid in the group home with us who kept bothering Gabe. I got between them and he hit me in the face. Cut me. We had to live in the same house with him for a whole year until he aged out. I had to fight him over and over again. He scared Gabe. One time I think he broke one of my ribs. Nobody helped us._

**There’s no one you can count on. No one. Nobody gives a shit about anyone or anything around here.**

Robbie raised his hand a little, and Nacho caught the movement and nodded at him. Robbie counted off the rosary beads, not reciting anything, just feeling the plastic in his fingers. The widower finished with his story, the others commiserated for a few minutes. And then Nacho looked at him again, and Robbie blurted, “I lost my brother for three months.”

The others watched him respectfully, waiting for him to continue. The silence felt hard and cold. He ground his teeth and licked his lips.

“I couldn't stay in, in _foster care_ after I turned eighteen _._ I knew it. I got a job. I got our house. I thought they would let me take my brother. We would live together, him and me.” His throat cramped unexpectedly and his eyes watered. He dropped his head into his hands so no one else could see and took a shuddering breath. He hadn't meant to tell this story. He'd never thought this was a story he'd ever tell anyone.

“I didn't know the law. It wasn't simple. I had to be his _legal guardian._ I had to pay a lawyer. I had to send papers. Had to wait. But they moved my brother. The _foster_ said he was too much trouble. They sent him to a different house for children with _special needs._ Because I wasn't there to take care of him, because they made me move out. And when they read my papers—the judge almost didn't let me have him back. She didn't think I could take care of him. Even though I did it for many years.”

“That sounds very hard, to be separated from your family like that,” Nacho said.

“I got him back,” Robbie choked out. He covered his trembling lips with his palm. His cheeks burned, with embarrassment and with remembered terror. “He was so quiet. He didn't smile. I think they only took care of his body's needs. They didn't love him. Didn't talk to him. I have him now, but the judge could take him away again if I can't take care of him. They would hurt him if I can't take care of him. I need money—” Robbie felt his lips draw back in a grimace, a snarl. He held his breath, pushed the rage and heat back. Reminded himself why he was here. “I need money to take care of him, so I can't lose my job. But I have trouble managing my anger. That's why I'm here. I get too angry. I'm afraid I might hurt someone.”

“You must be under a lot of stress,” Nacho said.

“I'm handling it,” Robbie ground out, staring him in the eye for a long second.

Nacho drummed his thumbs against his knees, a quick prprprprp. “Tell us about your anger. What happens? What do you do?”

 _I've put over a hundred people in the hospital this year, and I've killed two people on purpose. It used to just be people who put my neighborhood in danger. Now it's like I'm looking for an excuse. A fix._ “A guy I work with yelled at my brother. I—it was as if there was a voice in my head, telling me to kill him.” **Very tactful, “a voice in my head.” You know, I take that as an “ableist slur.”** “A friend was watching my brother, and she lost him. There were all these...terrible names and thoughts in my head about her, even after we found him. A _teaching aide_ at the middle-school ignored my brother's medical problem, and I wanted to...I scared him. He was just trying to do his job, he didn't know.”

“Sounds like you're very protective of your brother,” Nacho said.

Robbie gave him a flat look. “He's my brother. That part's normal.”

“What's not normal?”

“The things I want to do to people. How long my anger lasts. Wanting to hurt people who haven't done anything to us.”

Nacho cocked his head. “Robbie, I'm gonna suggest something. Don't take it the wrong way.”

Robbie shrugged and steeled himself. “Tell me.”

“Very often, feelings of anger—especially uncontrollable, unfocused anger—are expressions of a different emotion entirely,” Nacho said delicately. “Fear. Helplessness.”

“I'm not helpless,” Robbie insisted. “I have a good job. I can afford everything my brother needs. I can get more money if I need it. I'm not afraid, it's _other people_ that I want to hurt. I want to hurt other people, all the time, and it's getting worse and I don't know how to stop.”

“I'm sorry,” said Nacho, sitting back and spreading his palms. “It's just, if it were my brother—after what you told me about the judge and all, I'd be terrified.”

“I'm handling it.”

“I believe you.” Nacho looked him in the eye, and Robbie let out a breath. Nacho did believe him. It wasn't a trap, he didn't think. “I can give you some suggestions on how to deal with your emotions in a healthier way.”

“Please.”

“There's a list of tips on anger management from the Mayo Clinic. And prayer. Prayer isn't just a time to ask for help and intercession, although the Holy Mother is always listening—prayer is a time to be honest with yourself, before the Saints. Setting aside ten minutes a night for prayer and meditation can make a huge difference in your perspective and self-control. There's a novena I like, to Mary Undoer of Knots. It's my favorite set of meditations for anger. I'll get you the links. I think it's worth the effort to do both, the tip sheet and the novena.”

“I can try,” Robbie said, swallowing his disappointment. He barely remembered how to pray. He wrapped the rosary in his hands around and around his thumb.

“If you do nothing else, I recommend practicing forgiveness.” Robbie tensed, and Nacho continued, gently. “If you hold on to grudges, your anger will continue to poison you. You'll forget how to feel any other way. It will separate you from your family, your community, and the counsel of the saints and the Holy Spirit. Forgiveness is one of the greatest lessons Christ taught us.”

**Yeah, look how well that worked out for him.**

_God can forgive people all He wants,_ Robbie agreed. Aloud, Robbie said, “Thanks for your advice.”

“These are just suggestions,” Nacho said. “Do you have any other family or close friends you can go to for help, or just to talk when things get hard?”

Robbie stared at Nacho's shoes, silent. At last he said, “My uncle lives with us.”

Nacho smiled. “Good, good. Have you ever gone to him with your problems? Just to talk?”

“All the time,” Robbie said. “He likes it when I get angry. He thinks it's funny.” **It's hilarious.**

“We never do know exactly what goes on in someone else's head,” Nacho said. “He could just be trying to lighten the mood, and not understand that he's being dismissive of you.”

“He understands a lot.” Robbie crooked his thumb, with the rosary wrapped around it, until his first knuckle started to redden and the plastic stretched. “He just got out of prison.” **Oh, please.** “For...killing. And he has these ideas, work I can help him with that would get more money for my brother. Says I'd be good at it. And it's true. It would get a lot of money, and I would be good at it. He's a bad man and he wants me to be like him.”

Nacho's eyes widened in concern. “These ideas. Would they get you in trouble?”

Robbie shook his head, very small. They would not get him in trouble, because no one would catch him. “They are sins.” He wound and unwound the rosary. “Sometimes I think he wants to help.”

“Does he,” Maria interrupted from across the circle.

**What I gotta do to prove it to you? Of course I want to help.**

_You tried to take Gabe._

“Sometimes,” Robbie answered Maria.

She narrowed her eyes. “When it's convenient for him? When it puts you in his debt?”

Robbie thought back over the past year, and nodded.

**Oh, that's not fair. That's not fair! You have the body! I'm at a constant disadvantage, here, it's like pulling teeth to get you to do anything, for me or for yourself!**

“And he's trying to recruit you for some scheme. What is it, drugs? Extortion?”

Nacho raised his hands. “Guys, guys. I tell you every time. We're not trying to fix each-other's lives here. Robbie, you don't have to answer that.”

“This is different, Nacho,” Maria said. “Is your uncle pressuring you to do something illegal?”

Robbie thought for a long time. This meeting was first-names only. Tony hadn't seemed to recognize him; they'd never run into each-other in high school, and now they'd both graduated. They weren't even in East LA proper anymore; he'd never see these people again unless he came back. He nodded.

“And he knows how you are about your brother.”

“I'd do anything,” Robbie admitted.

“Does he use that to manipulate you?”

He nodded.

“How old are you?”

“Maria!” Nacho interrupted.

“Old enough,” Robbie said.

“You can't be older than twenty-five,” Maria pressed. “And you have a sick brother and you need money. That's dangerous. Understand? He is an adult, he's been in prison, he's got years of experience to draw on that you don't have. He can get you to do whatever he wants.”

“He can't,” Robbie insisted. “He—he's stuck. He got hurt bad in prison, and he can't do anything without me. There's a line, we made a deal.”

“What kind of deal?” Maria demanded.

Robbie opened and shut his mouth. _Murder. I get to pick the murders._ Carefully, he said, “I have to help him, with things. But I get to choose when we do them.”

**Yes. Exactly. You are fully on-board here. Northwick, that was all you. I have been nothing but fair and patient with you, boy!**

“He's already doing it,” Maria said. “You see? Now he gets to say, 'See, you helped, you were aware before the fact, you're an accessory. Now you've got to help me with this other thing; you might as well, because you're already guilty.' He won't stop. He's going to use you until you're used up, put his sins in you, pin his crimes on you. You have to get him out of your life.”

“I can't,” Robbie protested, panic rising in his lungs. “I can't. But we have a deal, it's all I can do.”

“Did you make this deal freely? With no implied threats to you or your brother? And do you really think your uncle is going to honor it, instead of just going behind your back and doing whatever it is you keep dancing around?”

Robbie shook his head. **Don't listen to this bitch. You heard her, she doesn't give a shit about her own father.**

“You can't make deals with people who have power over you,” Maria said, her dark eyes burning. “You shouldn't honor deals when the other side has no honor. Your uncle wants you to become a criminal and he's using your human decency to make it happen, because he's a low person and it's all he knows.”

“Maria is right,” Emely said. “Get away from him. Run, if you have to.”

“You're welcome to stay with my brother,” Javier added. “He keeps offering to hide me, but his house is the first place the enforcers would look for me and I can't do that to him. But you, no one would make that connection. I'm sure he'd help you.”

“I can't—I can't just leave,” Robbie said, his voice cracking. “And I can't kick him out. There's nowhere he can go.”

“It's always good to feel compassion,” Emely said, putting her hand on his shoulder. “Don't let anyone take that from you. But remember this. It is natural and good to love those who are close to us, whether their behavior is good or evil. To want what they want, to take their perspective and let their opinions become yours. It's natural. But when you love a lost person who does not love you, or loves you in a twisted way, that is because of your goodness, not theirs. Do not mistake your affection for safety.”

**That is such bullshit. You are safer with me than you have _ever_ been, Robbie. You and Gabe both. I give you power. Protection. Ideas. You are only alive because of me. You _owe_ me. And I'm nice enough that if you give me what I want, you'll get what you need. We're partners! Act like it!**

“Don't let him drag you into his wickedness,” Javier added.

_I already have._

“Tell him you're not interested in his scams,” Maria said. “Use small words. If he keeps pushing, he doesn't want to help you, he wants to use you. Doesn't matter if he's family. Get him out of your life. First make your brother safe, in case he tries to retaliate. And then show him the door.”

 _I can't,_ Robbie thought, pressing his hands over his mouth. _I can't. I can't. I would, but I can't._

**No shit.**

He took wheezing breaths and Emely rubbed circles into his back. She wrapped her arm around his shoulders and he tensed and curled forward, but leaned over to let her pull him against her side.

**You're dead, Robbie. I don't mean that unkindly. You're dead, and we're one and the same. Even if there was a way to cut our souls apart, I don't think you or Gabe would like what happens after.**

“I can't,” Robbie said. “I really can't. And I want to hurt people. I'm bad, I'm like him. There's no difference between us.”

“No, no,” Emely said, squeezing him tighter. “I don't know you, Robbie, but the things you've said, you are full of doubt and compassion. Two emotions abusers rarely have.”

“I get so angry.”

Tony spoke up, in English, from across the circle. “Man, what's up with your parents? Can't they help you with this stuff?”

“They're gone,” Robbie choked. “I don't remem—I don't want to talk about it.”

Everyone but Emely hissed slightly, and Robbie wished the floor would swallow him.

**You're a fuckin' basketcase, kid. You need me. I'm the glue that holds you together.**

“Shut up,” he hissed in English. “Shut-up, shut-up, shut-up, shut-up.” He smelled exhaust fumes when he exhaled. He was starting to lose it. He buried his face in his hands, trying to filter his breath through his sleeves so no one would notice.

Emely kept holding him and rubbing up and down his shoulder, and either she or he started to rock back and forth in their seats. Robbie let her, and for an endless minute it was just darkness and pressure and someone trying to soothe him and calling him cariño.

He pulled away slowly. His cheeks burned with embarrassment. The white cuffs of his hoodie were stained gray with soot from his breath; he tucked them under the sleeves of his leather jacket. Someone handed him a paper towel to dry his eyes on.

“Guys, let's take a minute,” Nacho was saying. “That was some heavy stuff, Robbie. Are you getting help? Outside of this meeting?”

Robbie shook his head, looked up slowly. Focused at the wall over Nacho's shoulder. “No, sir. I—I'm handling it. I just needed some advice.”

“Hey. Nobody re-sets their whole outlook on life after one meeting. Stick around, I'll get you those links and some counseling resources.”

“Thank-you, sir.”

Nacho checked around the circle, making eye contact with each participant willing to make eye contact with him. “I think it’s time to close in prayer. Robbie, you’re new here. We like to follow up with a prayer for special intercession for whatever we’ve talked about today; we try to rotate so nobody gets overworked. Do you have a particular prayer in mind? We bother San Antonio a lot, and Santa Dymphna, also San Judas if we’re feeling especially down.”

Robbie blinked at him, above his paper towel. He hadn’t been to church in over ten years. He had no damn clue.

But no. He did. He pointed at Maria. “Her medal.”

“San Benito?” Maria confirmed.

Robbie nodded. “I lost it when I was a kid. Against the cursed one.”

 **Your mother had the most charming nicknames for her in-laws,** Eli drawled.

“Interesting choice,” Maria muttered in English. She fingered the silver disk at her wrist, the saint on one side, the cross and letters on the other.

Nacho bobbed his head at her. “Maria, would you lead us in prayer tonight?”

“Sure can,” she said with a wry smile. “It’s a short one. Easy to remember, especially when I paraphrase.”

“Here we go,” Nacho muttered, raising one eyebrow. It looked like he was trying not to grin.

Maria raised her voice. “Repeat after me:

“Fuck off, Satan.”

Robbie’s eyes widened. Beside him, Emely hissed in a sharp breath, eyes wide and scandalized but her hand hiding a stifled grin. “Fuck off, Satan,” Robbie parroted.

“Everything you say is a suckjob.”

They chorused back to her, Javier, Nacho, even Emely. Tony stared at the crucifix as if expecting to be struck by lightning. Nacho shared a grin with Maria.

“You pissed in this beer. Drink it yourself.”

Robbie let out a shaky breath as they finished.

“Great closing note. Thanks, Maria,” Nacho said. “Stick around a minute, Robbie. For your information, that is a...spiritual approximation of one of the oldest prayers of exorcism the Church endorses—if you want the original Latin, you can look that up, it’s Vade retro Satana. I like it because it rhymes.”

They stood, picked up their coffee cups and paper towels, and put away the circle of chairs. Robbie went to drop his rosary back in the basket. Tony stopped him. “You can keep that,” he said. “The little kids make them during the sermons. They’re for everybody. You kinda need one if Nacho’s having you do novenas.”

Robbie looked down at the purple sparkly rosary in his hand. He fished around in the basket until he found a blue one, and switched them out. “Does it help?” he asked.

Tony glanced over his shoulder at the crucifix, leaned in as if to shield Robbie from being overheard. “I know it’s not right to think about prayer as whether it helps or not,” he murmured, “but it’s what you put in that’s important. Helps you focus.”

“My focus isn't the problem,” Robbie muttered.

 **Tonight's a bust. You've just wasted time, sat around while these clowns** _**insulted** _ **me, trying to fix what don't need fixing. Anger's just your nature, Robbie. Don't try to change your nature.**

_Maybe I don't want it to be my nature. Okay?_

He got his phone out and googled the Mayo Clinic's recommendations for anger management—something he could have found on his own without driving out to Boyle Heights and feeling guilty over the fact that he hadn't been to church in ten years. There were ten simple steps, most of which Robbie already knew. 'Think before you speak'—Robbie did that. He was just usually still angry by the time he'd decided what he was going to say. 'Exercise,' Robbie got plenty of, if Ghost Rider counted. But he didn't have an hour to spare for a morning jog in his human body. 'Use humor,' fine, sarcasm and the dramatic understatement were super effective to defuse the cold, deep-banked rage that smoldered at his core. 'Practice relaxation techniques:' Robbie knew a great one—first you get two thousand dollars in cash, then you count it over and over until you fall asleep. The next time he had two grand in cash, he'd hang on to it a while, keep it in his nightstand until he used it up. 'Seek help,' he'd just done.

'Don't hold a grudge.'

 _I can't do this,_ he thought.

He felt a ripple of smugness from Eli.

At his request, Nacho printed out some of prayers for Robbie off the reception desk's computer, so Robbie didn't have to give out his email address. How To Rosary for lapsed Catholics and newbies, and a set of seven meditations to say after the rosary—the novena, a rotating nightly program.

“We gonna see you back next week?” Nacho asked as he stapled the prayers together and handed them over.

“Maybe.”

“You should come to mass the week after next. Father Padilla is coming by, so we'll have confession and communion.”

No way was Robbie doing confession. “I'll think about it.”

Emely gave Robbie a little wave and a pat on the arm before she pushed out the front door, followed by Maria, and Victor, the widower. Tony and Javier, of all people, were still out in the sanctuary, talking quietly. Robbie trudged out of Our Father's House into the dark and windy street, the prayers stuffed into his back pocket, shoulders hunched.

“Forgiveness is hard, huh,” he heard as the door shut behind him.

Maria was leaning against the painted cinderblock wall, arms crossed, watching him.

“I saw you shut down when Nacho got into that part,” she said in English. “It's okay. He means well. People like him see a different world.”

Robbie peeked through the door and made sure that they weren't about to be overheard. He glanced around his shoulder and walked around into the alley between the stores. Maria followed him. This was ridiculous. He was here for anger management, not a drug deal, although if he thought drugs would help, he was about desperate enough to start. “You have any better ideas?”

As she stepped into the shadows, Maria gave a grim, wry smile, more a baring of teeth. “I've got some Army bullshit. It helps me.”

“Like your prayer?”

“Just getting back to the original intent,” Maria said, and Robbie snorted. “You want my Army bullshit? It's good. It'd be real good if anyone actually practiced it. I think it helps.”

“Sure.”

“It's call and response. It's short.”

“Short is good.” Robbie backed against the alley of the store-turned-sanctuary, feeling illicit and desperate.

Maria's tone changed, turning firm, clear, vaguely Southern. “The ethical warrior is a protector of life,” she declared. “Say, whose life?”

“Whose life?”

“Self, and others. Say, which others.”

“Which others?”

“ _All_ others.”

“All others?” Robbie repeated. Eli was silent, listening in the back of his head.

“All others,” Maria confirmed. “Yeah. Some bullshit. But it's bullshit worth believing. You know?”

Robbie looked up at the dull stars, the sky-glow of Los Angeles. “All others. The _Army?_ ”

“The Army. The Army of the United States of America. Didn't apply to me, I just drove trucks. But what it means is, when you're angry, you remember. Use your anger. Anger is a signal that something is wrong. Be a warrior, master your emotions, and fix what's wrong. Protect yourself. Protect others. If you're the only one in danger, remove yourself rather than fight. If someone else is in danger, remove them rather than fight. And if, only if, the danger cannot be avoided, that's when you fight. And you stop when the threat is neutralized.”

 _I don't stop. I don't master my emotions. I let them push me, and I hit people until they can barely breathe, and I hunt people, and I look for excuses to hurt them._ “I'm not a, a warrior,” Robbie said. “I'm just trying to keep my head down. Keep my brother safe.”

“That's what a real warrior would say,” Maria said. “Anyway, I've always had trouble with forgiveness. As a commandment. But forgiveness doesn't mean you let people abuse you. It means, to me, it means, don't waste energy on feeling anger, when you could be taking steps to protect yourself.”

“And others,” Robbie said.

“And others.”

**Hm. Changed my mind about her. This is good. This is our mission, Robbie. Listen to your anger, fix what's wrong.**

“Thank-you, ma'am,” Robbie said. They wandered out of the alley, having completed their covert exchange. “And thank-you for your service.”

She snorted. “I told you. I just drove trucks.”

“Then thanks for the bullshit.”

“No problem.”

 

* * *

 

Boyle Heights wasn’t that far from Hillrock Heights, but there was no quick way to get across town—just a few arterials, and so many two-lanes and stoplights. Stop and go. Long pauses in the wide streets. A few homes and businesses had already strung up Christmas lights. He saw trash in the gutters, junked cars parked on lawns. He saw a young man sweeping the street with a push-broom, he saw a man and a girl working on an early 00’s Eclipse in their carport by the light of a work lamp. He saw neglect, he saw repair.

It was exactly the same as Hillrock Heights; the same age, the same number of dead streetlights, the same haphazard mix of residential and commercial zones; different graffiti but only if you knew what to look for. He didn’t hate Boyle Heights like he did Hillrock. Maybe because he wasn’t trapped here. Maybe because he was seeing it fresh.

He saw a kid stuffing a can of spray-paint surreptitiously into his backpack and jogging away into the dark; he hoped the kid got home safe. He hoped the kid was tagging his own name, his personal brand onto some wall, rather than the brand of a gang controlling him. But he didn’t hate the kid, not like he’d hated Guero.

The world was in soft-focus. Maybe it was because he’d just cried in front of a bunch of strangers.

He crossed back into East LA, familiar numbers on familiar streets. There were Christmas lights going up here, too. Someone had tied twenty strands of them to the trunk of a palm tree, staking them to the ground to trace an invisible evergreen in the air.

He wasn’t sure if tonight was a bust or not. He’d already figured out the Mayo Clinic’s advice on his own and he was following it as well as he possibly could. He wasn’t holding out that much hope on prayer, but maybe prayer was stronger than holy water, and in any case, it was sure to annoy Eli. The Ethical Warrior code, he wasn't sure if it was his salvation or just blanket permission for vigilantism.

He pulled up to his apartment block and parked on the street, trudged to the exterior door, let himself in. At the door to his own apartment, he paused. Stared at the number for a long moment.

He’d said he was going to forgive Lisa. Ought to keep that promise now.

He unlocked the door and stepped in. Smelled egg and cheese. “Hey, Gabe, I’m back,” he called.

Gabe buzzed to the entry of the kitchen in his chair and stopped, gave him a careful stare. He was blocking Lisa behind him. “Robbie?” Gabe demanded.

Robbie stopped at the threshold, looked him in the eye, exhausted and suddenly miserable. “Yeah, it’s me. It’s Robbie.”

“Robbie-Robbie?”

“Yeah, buddy.”

Gabe whirred forward again, still watching him, and Robbie, with no idea, still, how he could possibly prove his identity, gazed back, waiting. Gabe nodded suddenly. “Robbie’s back!” he announced. “Lisa, this is Robbie.”

Lisa struggled to keep a straight face. “I know, Gabe. I can see him.”

“Did you guys have fun?” Robbie asked, hanging up his jacket.

“Yeah!” Gabe zipped over to him. “I cooked dinner!”

“You did? Did it taste good?”

“I dunno. It's time for dinner, Robbie! Come to the table!”

Robbie followed him into the kitchen, where two place settings waited, along with two bowls covered with dish cloths.

“Gabe was telling me he wanted to learn how to cook, so I looked up some recipes online of things you can make in the microwave,” Lisa said.

“With the egg, in the shell, the gas expands, it's a lotta-lotta PSI, it explodes. The shell explodes,” Gabe explained excitedly. “It has to have the shell or it doesn't explode. You break it and mix it with cheese and take the shell out and put it in the microwave until it's not gross anymore. And spinach doesn't explode _at all._ ”

**Oh, that's cute! The runt's making himself useful. Robbie, tell your brother he's cute.**

“You made dinner?” Robbie asked, finally processing the scene in front of him. “Thank-you, Gabe.”

“You're welcome,” Gabe said, whirring over to the place setting with no chair. “I made scrambled eggs and spinach and butter sauce, and cheese. Lisa helped. Thank-you, Lisa.”

“I didn't let him get hurt,” Lisa said. “We looked up some recipes online and I was watching the whole time.”

Robbie sat down and looked up at her. She looked hard. Her mouth was thin, like her mother's.

“I used the hot-pads!” Gabe exclaimed. “Microwaves make bowls really hot. You have to check first and use hot-pads if it's too hot.”

“You're right, buddy. I'm so proud of you. I didn't know you—I'm glad you guys had fun, and Lisa was there to help. Lisa,” he looked up. “You want to, uh, stay? For dinner?”

“My two and a half hours are up and you're out of eggs,” Lisa said.

Gabe's face fell. “I didn't make enough dinner.”

Robbie and Lisa both started talking at the same time.

“No, you made it just right with what we have—”

“I already ate—”

“Didn't plan to get groceries 'till Saturday—”

“My mom's gonna worry if I'm not back soon, I have to go.”

“Oh,” Gabe said. He sniffled.

Lisa tip-tapped over to him in her low heels and rubbed his back. “Hey. Hey. There's always next time. Okay? We can do dinner next time.”

“I'm sorry, Lisa.”

“No-no, you don't have to be sorry, you made a nice dinner for your big brother, right?”

Robbie cut in. “Yeah, you did, Gabe. Great job.”

“Is Lisa still our friend?” Gabe asked. “I want Lisa to be our friend.”

Robbie and Lisa shared an awkward look over his shoulder. “Yeah, uh, of course, Gabe. Lisa's our friend.”

“I've got to go,” Lisa said, giving Gabe one last pat on the back before she got her purse.

Robbie dug his roll of bills out of his pocket and handed her the cash for the night. “I'll walk you out.”

“My car's back, so I don't need you to taxi me home,” Lisa said. When they left the apartment and stood under the yellow porch-light, she added, “You don't have to pretend we're friends. I mean, he's your brother, but it just seems—”

Robbie groaned. “I'm not pretending. I really would like to have you over for dinner again.”

Lisa pulled back, raised an eyebrow. “You're not just saying that? You're not still mad?”

“I trust you,” Robbie said, forcing himself to look her in her eyes, with the big rounded false lashes and the sparkly wings, and the crinkle of tension and moisture in the corners. “I trust you to not to let Gabe out of your sight and to tell me immediately if anything happened to him. Or I wouldn't have hired you.”

Lisa looked down suddenly. “I'm so sorry. You know I'm sorry? When I lost him, that must've been the worst night of your life.”

“It was up there,” Robbie agreed. His heart began to race at the memory, and his core felt hollow and light. His palms tingled.

“You're telling me you're not mad anymore? You look kinda...really mad.”

“I don't want to be,” Robbie said through gritted teeth. He smelled engine fumes, and he hoped it was just left-over from his near-meltdown at the little church. “I'm having problems with my anger.”

 **Anger is a signal of a problem. See this bitch? She's your problem. Listen to your anger.** _**Fix** _ **the problem.**

“I don't want to let my emotional problems get in the way of our friendship,” Robbie said, glaring at the street sign over Lisa's shoulder. “And I think you learned your lesson.”

Lisa glared at him. “Go screw yourself.” She stalked off. Robbie watched from the apartment threshold until she got into her Beetle and started it.

“Great,” Robbie said as she drove off. “Just...great.”

**Cut her brake lines.**

_Fuck off, Eli._

**Then find another problem to fix. Put on some Cop Radio. You take out dangerous people, you're _protecting life,_ Robbie. **Eli stirred the fires below Robbie's heart, and his breath started to steam out his nose, crackle deep in his chest. His hunger faded away.

“No,” Robbie muttered into the night. “No. No-no-no-no-no.” Not now. Gabe was alone in the house, he hadn't eaten yet. He was waiting to eat dinner with Robbie. He'd cooked. He was so proud of himself. Robbie had to eat with him, he _had_ to. The fires kept boiling, gasoline sweet on his breath. _No,_ he insisted. Burning up wasn't an option right now. But after—

_Later._

The fires ebbed.

**Tonight.**

_Yeah._

Robbie took deep, cleansing breaths of the dusty night wind as the fires settled. He had a promise, a plan. Burning up could wait. But not long; he could feel the peace was temporary.

He returned to the apartment, the new smells, the familiar dents and stains on the walls, Gabe's long, interrogatory stare and final nod and smile. He smiled back, sat down to dinner. He was hungry again. Egg-and-potato casserole, cheesy and filling, and chopped spinach, steaming and mashed together with butter and garlic. He gave both dishes an extra zap in the microwave and dished them each up. Cut the casserole into two big wedges, dug in. “Thank-you, Gabe. This is super tasty.” It was, but it would be better without the sickly metallic taste of exhaust in his throat.

Gabe took a few bites himself. “Really, Robbie?”

“Yeah, really, buddy. You should be proud. You want to show me how to make it? Or write it down while it's fresh in your head?”

“I'll write it down, Robbie, good idea.” He dug in with more enthusiasm, his grin returning.

Robbie ate quickly, scraped his empty plate. There was a little spinach left. He took half. “Buddy, you know I'm happy to cook, and help out, and hang out with you, right? I'll always love you. You're my little bro. You don't have to worry about anything but school. Everything else is my job.”

“But I want to help,” Gabe said. “I can do things. I'm happy to cook, too.”

“Then I guess you're gonna cook. I can cook school nights and you can cook Saturday and Sunday, sound right?”

“Today's not Saturday and Sunday. Today's Wednesday.”

“We can change it up sometimes. Say.” He spotted a stack of paving-stone-sized soft-cover texts by the door. “Where'd those come from?”

“Lisa gave them to us.”

Robbie got up and looked. SAT prep books. Lisa trying to bribe her way back into his good graces—no, that was ludicrous, she didn't care what he thought. She just gave people things. It was who she was.

“Are you gonna read 'em, Robbie?”

Robbie envisioned another grinding afternoon at the testing center, more nights of studying by the cabin light between Uber fares. More fees. Community college, night classes. Master Automotive Technician.

He sighed. “Yeah.”

 

* * *

 

His anger idled deep under his bones all through dinner. He could feel the car across the street, click-click-clicking as the engine warmed against the chill night air. He looked over Gabe's homework for the night, approved an hour of MarioKart. Had a glass of water after Gabe went to bed. Took his phone so he could kid himself he was going to cruise for fares—but no. He wasn’t picking up fares tonight.

 **Commercial district first,** Eli advised. **You see the shoes hanging from the wires, you keep your eyes peeled. Grid-search, up and down. Look for the cars.**

_I know._

**Look for the out-of-place cars, the real nice cars, the Benzes, the Porsches. Nobody’s got any business parking that kinda car in the industrial district ‘less the street rats are stone terrified of retribution, or they’d lose their rims in a heartbeat.**

_I know. I got this._

He cruised down the arterials in the sparse, late-night traffic, counting his breaths. In-two-three, out-two-three. He kept digging down on the throttle too hard, making the blower squeal, his heart race. _Quiet. Quiet._

**Heh. Your blood’s up. Gonna be a good night’s work.**

_This isn’t work. This isn’t my job. I don’t want to be here._

**You want me to take you to Arizona to punch some rocks?** Condescending.

At the suggestion, Robbie’s breath stuttered in frustration. That wouldn’t be enough. He needed to feel—needed to accomplish something. Solve a problem. Break bones, smell blood boiling against his faceplates, see the terror in his prey’s eyes, feel powerful—no, that wasn't what he needed. But that was what he was driving toward.

He saw a pair of kids leaning against a drugstore's front stoop, over-sized shorts and jerseys, duplicates of Guero and his crew: enjoying the night breeze, maybe. Sharing music, maybe. But the tingling in his palms and the burn at the base of his lungs said drug running, said posting lookout, said watching for victims. He did not know any of these things. His engine hummed with aggression; he slowed as he passed them. There were no cameras, no passing cars at that moment, no witnesses: they watched him with narrowed, hostile expressions, but they were exquisitely vulnerable. There was no safety in pairs, not from him.

He drove on. Eli chuckled in his ear.

He passed a cluster of women, five of them, wearing a mix of shorts-and-jerseys, studs-and-leather, victory-rolls-and-circle-skirts. Too many. But a conspicuous group. They would be walking between bars and music clubs, and eventually they would be drunk, or they would start walking home and disperse, and then there would be one woman, walking alone. Sheet of plastic wrap over the face, stifle screams and weaken her with suffocation. His shoulder shifted under the phantom weight of a kicking body. He drove on.

Two women standing at the edge of an alley, high-heeled boots, short skirts, fluffy faux-fur jackets shuddering in the wind. Wave his roll of cash. Name a nearby motel. Take her to Turnbull Canyon instead. No.

He wasn't going to hurt Lisa, he wasn't going to hate her, he wasn't going to cut her brake cables. When Lisa had lost Gabe last year, she'd been eighteen, but not like Robbie was eighteen: she had made an honest mistake. It wasn't right for Robbie to turn his rage on Lisa.

Robbie was a fighter. He hurt people—people who had it coming. People who threatened him and his brother. People who attacked his coworkers, his teacher. People who recklessly endangered his neighbors, who murdered the innocent. He did not attack opportunistically. He did not act on spite. He did not murder innocents.

“Low fucking bar,” he muttered as he cranked the wheel around a street corner.

**Check out that Caddy.**

A black SUV waited in roadside parking outside a long-shuttered laundromat. No driver camped out at the wheel like the big organized crime figures liked, but still. A conspicuous car.

**Grid search. Up and down this road four blocks each direction, then a block to the side, repeat.**

_Figure out where the cars are clustered around. I know._

He spotted a battered Honda near a self-storage facility, a cluster of cars near a busy bar. A supercharged Chevy Nova, sanded down with giraffe-splotches of body filler all over the panels, in front of a boarded-up restaurant. A Lexus RX near the loading doors of a warehouse.

**Getting warmer.**

He kept cruising, up and down the blocks between the oddly-placed cars. The Caddy—obvious. The Nova—a junker once, but no longer. The Lexus—just as obvious as the Caddy, without the ostentation. He drove slowly, practically idling in first, drifting up and down in the dull streetlamps, the engine chug-chugging. He counted his breaths, strictly measured out the pressure of his foot on the throttle. He peered down alleys, eyes and mirrors alert to movement. He spotted a strange silhouette on the top of a roof. It shifted: a human figure, crouched at the edge, elbows resting on knees, shoulders rounded. A lookout.

_I see him._

Robbie cruised by, not speeding or slowing, but he turned sharply in his seat and examined the row of storefronts in the lookout's view.

Insurance agency, sushi bar, hookah bar, motorcycle parts—all apparently operating, unbroken glass, menus plastered to the windows of the sushi bar. The hookah bar’s windows were blacked out, but he saw people parked out front, local cars. The next corner: laundromat, Zumba fitness, a restaurant just closing down for the night whose bright lights read “ta’s…ood,” a Muay Thai studio, payday loans. Maybe, maybe the Muay Thai studio—no one would be in, and the windows were screened. There were security cameras at either end of the row of low storefronts on the block.

He peered back in his mirror at the building the lookout perched on. It had good access—an alley led up to it, concealed behind the high concrete wall of a neighboring used car lot. It was dark, and no one was parked out front.

He made a last circuit, skipping a couple blocks to park just up the street from where the person still watched for him. He peered out in the dim yellowing streetlights. A darkened sign just below the roof, T&J Used & Custom Furniture. A steel grate over the door, plywood on the windows. A tag on the plywood read Blüe Crüe—no one had tagged for the Blue Crew since they’d been busted up that spring. It gave Robbie a time-line on how long the store had been left to rot. Plenty of time for the roaches to move in.

There were gaps between some of the plywood sheets where a steady light shined out.

He sat in the car and watched the light that shone through the plywood, watched the lookout watch him. He counted his breaths, in-two-three-out-two-three. Kept his foot flat on the floor, away from the gas pedal. His engine idled, every now and then giving a little shudder of anticipation.

He wondered what was happening behind the boards. Kids and junkies didn’t post lookouts. Whoever was using the furniture store needed somewhere private for their work, needed a long warning before they disappeared. They needed plenty of space, otherwise they’d be working in their own home. Maybe they were doing something hazardous, like cooking meth. Maybe they were doing something technical, like adulterating and repackaging cocaine. Maybe they were stockpiling something that would alarm housemates or family, like weapons. People who planned and schemed and broke into vacant stores and turned the power back on and posted lookouts, people who were smart about crime and worked hard to succeed at it, those were the people Robbie hated. People who could have done better. Who could, if they were just less greedy, have put in the time and gotten a legitimate job, made their living at something that benefited people, like fixing cars or teaching, instead of killing and poisoning their neighbors. Those people deserved what was coming for them.

A streetlight flickered and went out. Flickered back on by itself. The insects that had accumulated in the bottom of its glass lens cast a gentle shadow on the sidewalk, like a tree canopy.

On the roof, the lookout straightened, then crouched lower—prone. Robbie caught a flash of a forehead in the light of a smartphone screen. Below, through the boards, the thin streak of light dimmed halfway up—someone passing in front of the lamp.

He waited more, watching the lookout. They made no move to switch roofs, as he might expect if they were separated from the rest of their crew—just crouched there, silhouetted against the flat roofline, staring at Robbie. Robbie goosed the throttle a bit, making the blower whine. The lookout ducked out of sight. Through the storefront boards, Robbie saw someone pass in front of the light again.

 _ **Good enough for me.**_ He let his breathing pick up, punched the gas again, slammed into first gear and lunged forward, leaving rubber on the asphalt. The engine howled. He bellowed his anger and disgust and frustration until his voice was the car’s voice, his flesh was fire, his hands were bone, and he hit the storefront at thirty miles an hour, shattering cinderblocks and howling as his bumper deformed and reformed. The storefront welcomed him with a blast of fire, like gasoline vapor. He stood as the fireball passed, walked right through the steering wheel and the engine block and the hood, into a big empty space scattered with boxes and barrels in the light of a halogen lamp. He saw four men in scorched plastic jumpsuits, and two expensive-looking pieces of machinery, and behind them, a big double door. He sent the car around toward the garbage alley, to chase down any runners.

He trashed the machinery first. Put his back into it and threw the big freestanding steel units across the room, where one pounded a satisfying hole into the floor and the other shattered into motors and cylinders. Bullets struck him, a whole spray of them, snapping through his ribs and ringing off his faceplates. He whirled, furious. One of the men had an automatic rifle. He was firing wildly at the Rider. People worked here. People lived here. He’d dared bring this weapon into his territory, and to top it off, he was stupid enough to think it might work on him. He stormed toward him as the man backed away, firing, then squeezing the trigger on an empty clip. He seized the man’s gun hand, lifted him by it, roared in his face. Bone and tendon and steel yielded under his grip; this man would never hold a gun in that hand again. He’d never use that hand again. He struck him again and again: now this man would never strike anyone with his left fist. Never run, never walk without a limp. Never speak or chew without remembering the Rider.

Movement: two other hazmat suits were making a run for the back doors. He revved the car’s engine and lurched forward again, broke the doors into aluminum curls, took the runners out by the knees with his front bumper and plowed them toward his feet. He passed his hand through the hood of the car, felt for the trunk, grabbed the chains. He swirled them in the cramped space and bound his two runners together while they were still stunned. They screamed from the hot steel. The Rider smelled burnt plastic, saw their suits melting and curling away from his chains. He struck them with fists and knees. Two for one. Punch one, and the other one would scream where his broken ribs rattled. A blow hard enough to break one man’s pelvis popped something in the other man’s knee. Their fear fed off each-other.

One man was wheezing and gurgling and the Rider contemplated stopping. He shouldn’t be killing them. But maybe he could hit him somewhere else, in the arms or legs. Leave the torso alone for a bit. Concentrate on the other man.

Movement in the mirror of the car: the last man, crawling, trying to edge past the car and out the hole in the back wall.

 _ **No.**_ He snarled, threw the chained men away, reversed and caught the sneak under the car tire.

A smart one. This would be good. The smart ones knew how badly they were hurt. Their fear was sweeter.

He hauled him up through the wheel well and struck him, again and again. He couldn’t see his face through the safety goggles and gas mask, so he ripped those off. It was an older man, lined face, little thick at the chin, graying stubble. Old enough to know better. Old enough to have gotten out of this game. His eyes were wet, his face ashen, his lips drawn back over his teeth. Fillings. Nice white teeth. Drug dealing came with dental.

But this was the last man. The others, he’d beaten for all they could take. He wasn’t ready to fade back to the darkness, his rage wasn’t spent, his thirst wasn’t satisfied, and this was just one man, one older man. He lifted the man by one wrist so he could see where he hit, the limbs to snap bones, lovetaps to bruise the torso, pausing to watch the man cry out and guard himself after every blow, to watch the despair build in his eyes. Threw him on the ground, watched him crawl away on his elbows while dragging one leg. Trapped him under one boot, felt the muscles of his back tremble and shiver with impending shock. He stared down at the man below him who sobbed and gasped into the rubble-strewn floor, whose entire being was currently devoted to escaping his attentions, who owed all his pain and his very life to the Rider, and felt power. Possession.

He lifted the man by the armpits like a child and gripped him, back-to-chest. One leg kicked, and he trapped it between his own legs; the man’s struggles failed against the rage-born strength beneath the Rider’s leather skin. He felt the man’s every shudder and jerk within his tight hold, felt every gasp, smelled burning hair and flesh as he nuzzled the man’s ear with his faceplates.

Oh, this was power. Oh, this was living.

He loved the smart ones, because they could see their future. He rolled the car forward to his reaching hand, and drew out a knife, his favorite knife, double-edged, a foot long, with the blood channel and the tactical handle. The storefront window against the plywood outside made a black mirror, and he turned the man to face it. Shook him a little until he could meet the man’s eyes in the mirror. Then he switched his grip, grabbed his prey by the hair on the back of his head, keeping the leg pinned between his thighs, and slowly, slowly raised the knife: a perfect bisecting plane up the center of his head. He felt the man go still.

_**Smart. But that won't help you.** _

The knife pressed up into skin, resistance that suddenly melted, and then it was only the friction of flesh on metal, the slow glide. The scent of blood, the sight of it pouring down the blood channel, so dark against the polished carbon steel. He felt the man swallow, saw the blood flow faster, heard him grunt. He looked at his prey in the mirror again. An inch higher, and then a sharp twist and he would feel the death throes like a bucking bull, see life and consciousness leave him. The man’s eyes were screwed shut, and he gave the knife a delicate twitch, just to say, wake up, friend. You don’t want to miss this.

The man’s eyes were huge and dark when he opened them. The whites showed all the way around. His jaw and lips were clenched. All his thoughts, all his life now fixed on the Rider—

_Not the Rider. Me._

Robbie surfaced within the Rider’s elation. It was his fist clenched in his victim’s hair, his skin the man struggled and shuddered against, his hand that raised the knife, his mind thrilling to the blood and pain and despair, his heart climbing toward some dreadful joy.

He centered himself in the body with a snap that caught Eli by surprise.

 **No! Do it!** _**Two inches,** _ **you want this, I can feel you wanting it!**

 _This isn’t our deal._ He jerked the knife straight down, out of the man’s tongue, and let him fall to the floor. The man heaved himself up on his elbows and drooled out a gout of blood.

**No! We're so close. We were this close! Two inches! Look at him. Look what we did. It felt good! It was good! Now finish it, boy, pick him back up, come on, two more inches, two inches!**

Robbie cast around the room, found a cell phone abandoned on the floor, the screen still showing its latest texts. The blood on his hand flaked off into a fine brown dust as he picked up the phone. He dialed 911 and threw it at the two chained men. They could talk to the dispatchers; he was pretty sure at least one had a functioning jaw.

**The fuck do you think you’re doing. You’re a coward. You want to beat these men to shit on one hand and rescue them with the other? You hypocrite. If they’re bad enough to maim, they’re bad enough to kill. You think you changed their lives? You think they’ll thank you for showing them the light? No. As soon as they heal up they’ll be out on the street peddling their poison because that’s all these cockroaches know.**

Robbie rolled the car the rest of the way into the space, over the rubble and boxes and scattered drums and motors, drove through the backs of his own knees and scooped himself into the driver's seat. Rumbled out through the hole in the front of the store and into the night. His rage burned, a tight, focused pilot flame. They wove up and around the empty streets. The lookout on the top of the building was long gone.

**You spoiled it. You’re still hot for action, kid, you’re not satisfied. You think you can go home and sleep in the same house as little Gabbie like this? Turn back. Finish the job. Unless you think you’ll find someone else tonight—nobody’s that lucky.**

_That’s not our deal. They don’t fit my criteria._

**Fuck the deal, kid! You’re not breaking the deal if you want it! You wanted it!**

_Because_ _**you** _ _wanted it._

**Oh, yes, perfect, _blame Eli._ Robbie, you _are_ me. And let me tell you what happens when I leave a job undone: it nags at you. It wakes you up in the middle of the night. It enrages you. It makes you twitch. Makes you obsess. They’re drug-dealing scum, a big operation, who knows how many foot-soldiers die over their product, how many users croak or kill each-other for it. You’re a warrior, a protector of life! Go back there and kill for it!**

Robbie pulled the car into an alley and snuffed out. The car was hot around his human body and reeked of sulfur and burning oil. He breathed hard, in and out, deep and slow, feeling his heart hammer in his chest. Sirens screamed in the distance and began to weave closer and closer.

 _They don’t fit my criteria,_ Robbie repeated. _I don’t kill because I want to._

**No, you kill because you _need_ to. You need to kill. You’re not done. You’re not satisfied.**

_I don’t care._

**You do care. I can feel your hunger. Your anger’s telling you there’s a problem needs solving. Now turn around and solve it.**

The rage still burned, still hot and humming in his palms and his heart and the eager rumble of the engine. Robbie waited, measuring his breaths, as the sirens drew nearer and nearer, until there was no way he could return for the man with the wounded mouth without some paramedic witnessing. _I’m not doing it._

Eli fell silent. He drew back so deep, he left a cold hollow void in Robbie’s head, a feeling like the first instant of falling down a flight of stairs. The silence was almost worse than the nagging and cajoling and chattering, because when Eli was silent, Robbie had no idea what he might be thinking.

“That was enough,” Robbie said into the silence. There was no answer from Eli; Robbie was alone in the car with his own rage. The rage was a sign of a problem, perhaps even a different emotion entirely: fear, helplessness. “Identify the problem,” Robbie said to himself. “Find a solution.”

The humming and tingling faded to the background, leaving him exhausted, sweaty, human. He reached under the seat and drank a water. It was two in the morning; he had work tomorrow.

Go home. Think. Sleep. Figure this out.

His rage was waiting for him.

 

* * *

 

When Robbie drove home and let himself into the apartment, Gabe didn’t stir; his evening meds made him a heavy sleeper. Robbie stood outside the closed door for a moment, as if he could hear through the thin plywood. He missed the days when Gabe used to leave his door cracked. But everybody needed privacy.

In his room, he dug the stapled print-outs from Nacho out of his pocket, Rosary For Dummies first. Figured that it would take at least thirty minutes he didn’t have. He skimmed through the prayers, then flipped past to the novena, Day One. He was supposed to pray the Rosary first, but he, well, maybe tomorrow night.

_Dearest Holy Mother, you undo the knots that suffocate your children. Extend your merciful hands to me. I entrust to You today this knot (mention your request here) and all the negative consequences that it provokes in my life. I give you this knot that torments me…I trust you and believe that you can undo this knot. I believe that you will do this because you love me with eternal love._

_Mary, Undoer of Knots, pray for me. You know very well how desperate I am, my pain and how I am bound by these knots. No one, not even the Evil One himself, can take the ribbon of my life from your precious care. In your hands there is no knot that cannot be undone. O my Lady, you are the only consolation God gives me, the fortification of my feeble strength, the enrichment of my destitution, and with Christ, the freedom from my chains. Keep me, guide me, protect me, o safe refuge!_

Mention your request here. He hadn’t thought he’d have to choose what to say. But this was what he needed to do, identify the problem, the source of his anger. Find a solution.

He stared down at the bright screen of his phone in his darkened room. He couldn’t pray this. Without putting a name on his problem, he couldn’t be honest. It was bad enough he didn’t pray; he wouldn’t lie or make things up the first time he started again.

He used to think a lot about what his life should have been. Mom and Dad should have stayed with him and Gabe; he should have grown up in this apartment, Mom’s art and furniture should never have been removed, the sunny yellow kitchen walls should never have been repainted. Robbie should have kept his bicycle and his San Benito medallion. Gabe should have had Mom and Dad to help take care of him so he never had to be alone. Maybe Dad could have made enough money for them to move, especially now Robbie was old enough to work.

But lately he was starting to think no one's life was how it should be. No one's life was what it looked like. Everyone had a hidden side and a false face; if Robbie had had Mom and Dad to lean on all his life, he wouldn't recognize himself. That wasn't the “knot” in the “ribbon of his life,” that was a whole different ribbon.

A knot was a distortion in a cord's proper shape. A knot in an electrical cable weakened the wires and, by damaging the insulation, could even cause it to short and become useless or dangerous. A knot wasn't something external; the Novenna wasn't asking Mary to lift a rock off his foot. A knot was just the thing itself, just Robbie, circling around and around one thing and not moving forward.

“Dearest Holy Mother,” Robbie said, tangling his plastic rosary around his fingers. “I am very angry—”

Yes, but he had plenty to be angry about. If Nacho was right, and his anger was actually fear, he had plenty to be frightened about, too. People got hurt around here all the time. Random violence could fall on Robbie; it had already fallen on Gabe. Emmanuel Grocer, Nora, maybe Lisa for all he knew. A knot was a distortion that weakened a cord and made it useless or dangerous; this anger was not a distortion.

Robbie hated. He hated Guero Valdez—less now, but when he was a healthy, aspiring thug, he'd hated him desperately, because Guero had been a dangerous asshole. He hated people who brought drugs into his neighborhood, rented normal houses on streets that families lived on and filled them with millions of dollars worth of product guarded by hardcases and teenagers armed with automatic rifles. He hated people who preyed on those weaker than them. He was not ashamed of these hatreds. The people who did these things deserved to suffer whatever violence would prevent them from doing it again.

Robbie hated Hillrock Heights. He hated the potholes and the hopelessness and the graffiti, he hated the school and the kids and the people who lurked in the bars on Hillrock Lane in the daytime. He hated his neighbors and he hated living here, even though he'd spent the happier years of his childhood here, even though it was the first place he'd been able to provide for Gabe, the only place he could afford on a junior mechanic's wages. He hated it even though his landlord remembered his parents and understood when he'd used to be late with the rent. He hated it even though the Patrick Wellman Development Center was just four blocks from his apartment and the teachers and doctors and therapists there worked hard at their jobs and helped Gabe and didn't look down on Robbie for needing financial aid. Even though there were people in Hillrock Heights trying to uplift the community, putting up murals over the gang tags, hosting music for the kids, organizing Pueblos Unidos projects. People who helped those in need, like the Valenzuelas and Ramón Cordova.

Robbie had died trying to escape Hillrock Heights. That was the first knot he recognized in the ribbon of his life: he'd died and now he owed his life to Eli Morrow.

Eli had told him once that his hatred made him the perfect host. As Eli's host, Robbie terrorized Hillrock Heights and half the San Fernando Valley, trying to direct his overflowing aggression away from the innocent, even as the horrors he saw strengthened his rage day by day. The locals argued about how to feel about the Rider: some were proud to have him, East LA's very own cape. Others, and all the newspapers, called him a joyriding supervillain. They were all wrong.

The second knot was shaped like this: the Rider's actions were reactive, not pro-active. He did not maim gangbangers for the sake of making Hillrock Heights a safer place; he did it because his rage and hatred had to go somewhere. And if the Nachos and Valenzuelas and Cordovas ever won the battle for the soul of East LA, then the Rider would be nothing but a plague.

The third knot was this: Eli wasn't satisfied with the status quo, and he would keep scheming and planning to get what he wanted, which was to use Robbie's body to kill. He was manipulative and stubborn and impulsive and obsessive, and also cunning. While Robbie was occupied with work and housing and trying to raise Gabe right, Eli had nothing better to do than to pry at the cracks in Robbie's mind.

This was the great snarl that all the knots made up together: Robbie was losing himself. He was all that stood between Eli Morrow and the living world, and while he could keep Eli out of his body nearly all the time, he could do nothing to keep Eli out of his head and heart, and he was fooling himself by pretending that didn't matter.

He folded his head over the rosary and tried again. “Dearest Holy Mother, extend your merciful hands to me. I entrust to you this knot that torments me: I'm afraid I can't stay safe for my brother to be around. I get urges to hurt people, and then I go find someone who deserves to get hurt. Because I don't think I can control it. I'm—I'm possessed. It's bad. I made a deal that I would kill people if they deserve it—I know that's not my place, but that's what I promised, and I'm not sorry but I'm scared. I'm turning into him. I don't know what to do.

“Holy Mother, no one, not even the Evil One himself, can take the ribbon of my life from your care. Mother Mary, you are the only one listening to me right now. Grant me freedom from these chains, in the name of your Son Jesus Christ.”

He wanted his mom. If they were alive, he could ask Mom or Dad about this whatever-this-was, addiction, indebtedness, peer pressure, bad blood. He listened hard: blood in his ears, freeway traffic, bass-boosted hip-hop from a car cruising down a distant street. He remembered, when he was very young, feeling a presence, sometimes. Warmth in the room.

 **She's not listening,** said Eli, breaking onto Robbie's consciousness so abruptly that he winced. **I am, though.**

_Fuck off._

**Morality is a construct, Robbie. It's just something they tell kids. You grow up, you stop believing, everything gets way easier. Trust me.**

Robbie put the rosary away in his bedside table. _I just want to sleep._

**So? Sleep.**

Robbie stood up from the bed and booted up his laptop. Alex Northwick was the first person Robbie had killed deliberately, rationally, as part of his deal with Eli. He couldn't blame the Rider or Eli at all: Robbie had found Candace, Robbie had decided to punish Northwick, Robbie had pushed Eli to help him. Weeks after the fact, Robbie still held that Northwick deserved what he got, every burn and break, in the chill of aftermath. But something nagged at him.

For all that Northwick had suffered in the minutes before he died, he had never shown regret or remorse. He'd died alone, and of the people he'd hurt, Candace wasn't around to see him pay, and Iris still imagined him on a tropical island looking for another innocent woman to entrap. Northwick hadn't learned anything before he'd died. Iris didn't have closure. As unlikely as it was, any hope that Northwick might confess to killing Candace was gone. Robbie was the sole witness to Northwick's last moments, and Robbie had never been hurt by him. He'd just obeyed the echoing scream of his psychometry that told him that Candace's death must be avenged. The sympathy of one murder victim for another.

He found Myspace, looked up DestinyDanger2001, saw all Candace's old entries with their clinical diagrams in Paint: arms with handprint bruises, expressionless faces with blackened eyes and green-tinted jawbones. At one of the recent entries, he saw a comment. He hadn't remembered any comments on here last time he'd looked.

  * Hey, Gremlin. I've been telling people about you, and now that your boyfriend's proved he's not Dr. All-American Ken-Doll Surgeon by wrecking his shitty sports car in a transparent attempt to fake his death, they're a lot more open to the idea that you're not just extremely accident prone but were, in fact, a dancer in high school and wrote your thesis on how to look both ways while crossing the street. They're putting up your Facebook photos. You look like a movie star. Mini-Bey. You look perfect. I wish you had had that perfect life they show in those photos. I'm sorry I let myself be fooled for so long.

I'm writing to warn you that I'm coming for your boyfriend. I'm coming for his money, his license, his reputation, his shitty cars, his house, everything they'll give me. It's the only way to hit him where it hurts. When he gets back from sipping Mai Tais on the beach, he'll have nothing left. They'll never get him in criminal court, but for a civil suit, we just need to show a preponderance of the evidence. He'll never be able to practice medicine again. He'll be in debt for the rest of his life. If he runs to Mommy and Daddy, well, with enough damages, they'll cut him off rather than pay. He'll die alone in the shadow of what he did to you.

It's a risky case but it's worth it to me if I can get some justice for you, even just the petty revenge of forcing him to defend himself in a wrongful death suit. Don't worry about the legal fees. What's money for if not to spend it on the people precious to me?

Know, always, you were precious to me. You were, you are, you always will be. I miss you so much, girl. You deserved a man who loved you the way you loved. You should have been so happy.

Forever, Snoots.




Robbie opened the drawer where he kept his English notebook, now full of hand-drawn maps and plans and observations and calculations. The jewel-cases with the hospital security footage were wedged into the plastic folder pocket just behind the front cover.

**No. No. No. We've been over this. Now you're asking to get caught. You don't want to get caught, do you?**

_I'm not going to get caught._

**That's just what someone who wants to get caught would say.**

**Hell. Get caught. Go to jail. I don't care, it'll be fun. We could light the whole place on fire.**

_Everything you say is bullshit. I'm not getting caught._

As he turned the March 12 jewel-case over and over in his hands, something painful deep within him relaxed and unwound. _Later,_ he told himself.

Sleep was heavy behind his eyes. He put everything away. He had work in a few hours. He went to bed.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter references the first story in this series, "La Leyenda."
> 
> The prayers and novena have been abridged. They were lifted from English-language sources online.
> 
> Maria's prayer is her personal adaptation of Vade Retro Satana, a prayer associated with Saint Benedict. She uses it as a mantra against addiction. The Latin is:  
> Vade Retro Satana,  
> Nunquam Suade Mihi Vana —  
> Sunt Mala Quae Libas,  
> Ipse Venena Bibas.
> 
> Which is supposed to mean:  
> Begone, Satan, do not suggest to me thy vanities — evil are the things thou profferest, drink thou thy own poison.
> 
> Maria is a troll.


	8. Human life has value. It has meaning. It is worth preserving.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Robbie takes the wheel.

Eight AM on a Friday, and Robbie was ferrying a pax from Pomona to a conference center downtown, a white lady in a suit. He was doing his best to get her to her conference by nine. Canelo didn't have a shift for him on Friday, but Robbie did work Sunday through Thursday now, which was good, regular hours. Gabe had already left on the bus. It was a rare overcast day—last night had been a rainstorm—so he felt safe to pick up pax long into the daytime without them complaining about the lack of air conditioning.

White ladies in suits were a mixed bag. They all thought they were respectable, but it was fifty-fifty or less on them being respectful. This one was nice so far. Didn't slam his door, said thank-you when he offered her a phone charger, and asked him to play whatever music he liked, so they'd listened to an entire _Sadica_ album off his phone.

“I'm a mechanic for my day job,” Robbie explained as they idled in a row of cars backed up at a red light. “I work at a local shop. It's close to my apartment. Just switched to full time, but I think I'll keep up my Uber registration on the side.”

“Congratulations,” the pax said. “Do you like being a mechanic?”

Absolutely no one had ever asked him this question. Robbie thought back over a typical day at Canelo's: Marty in the back swearing creatively at an inaccessible bolt, Alejo watching the work out the corner of his eye with a look like he might know exactly how to make everything ten times easier and he was debating whether to speak up or to wait and see if anyone figured it out, customers coming in with cars half-way to disintegrating on the road and being shocked that the estimate exceeded two hundred dollars, gearheads begging for someone to fix what they'd broken and in the same breath proclaiming their own superior expertise—“I'd do it, but I don't have the tools, yanno,” the long hours of endless problems, sore back, sore wrists, hunting through scrapyards and auctions for rare parts or just cheap parts for a client who might not even pay, reaching his hand blindly past hot steel into some tiny crevice...

“I love it,” Robbie said honestly. “I love cars. I love doing something worthwhile. Fixing things.”

“It's satisfying.”

“Yeah. Unless the customer can't pay for us to fix it right. Then, not so much.”

“Do you ever see yourself opening your own auto shop?”

Robbie snorted. “Uh...no.”

“You should think about it. You seem smart. You're passionate about what you do.”

“No, no. I got enough responsibility, I look after my brother.”

“Oh, how old is he?”

“Fourteen. He's going to my old middle-school right now, he just started.”

“Is he making friends?”

“Actually, yeah. This baby punk, Mateo. He's actually asked Gabe to come over to his place to play X-Box, it's weird, I never got to do that stuff when I was his age. I guess that's kind of the point. Give him what I didn't have.”

“It sounds like you're doing a good job with him.”

Robbie flushed. “Doing my best.”

They got to the conference center and the pax tipped him in the app and complimented the car before getting out. He gave her five stars.

Genuinely nice people were uncommon, but sometimes they could lift his mood all day.

**Radio.**

Robbie spat the aux-adapter out of the tape deck and flipped the little lever on the radio. Flipped through channels, listening for interesting police chatter while his phone listened for a ping.

The Rider did most work at night—Robbie's preference, because there were fewer civilians to worry about, and the Rider seemed happier in darkness. But they were less visible and harder to track in daylight, being on fire and all. Burning up was an option any time, if they heard anything especially tempting, and the more chatter they listened to, the more detailed their mental map of LA's criminal hotspots grew. Maintaining this map was Eli's responsibility—he had nothing better to do. Robbie flipped from station to station as he pulled into a movie theater's parking lot for a catnap and to wait for another ping. Stalled cars. Traffic stops. Illegal bonfire. Car theft. Silver alert. Suspicious loitering, which could be anything from cartel contractors putting pressure on a local drug distributor to a rock band hawking t-shirts and flyers.

And then:

“Reports of a multicar collision, Eastbound Figueroa Street Bridge, witnesses report there is a bus halfway over the guardrail, possibly unstable, request a tow truck and traffic control to support rescue operations on Westbound Figueroa Street Bridge, and set up detour from Riverside Drive to I-5. Any available units West of I-5, 110 interchange, divert traffic.”

Robbie sat up in his seat. “ _Halfway_ over the guardrail?”

“Repeat, multicar collision, Eastbound Figueroa Street Bridge, report of a bus halfway over the guardrail, possibly unstable. Request traffic diversion from Riverside Drive West of the river, tow truck to support fire and rescue, to approach from East of the river.”

 **We gotta check that out tonight on your future-phone. Reminds me of that movie,** _**Speed.** _

“That's over the river. That's a hundred-foot drop onto concrete. They said it's unstable?”

**Yeah. Dramatic tension.**

A sigh. **Kid.** _ **Really?**_ **That ain't for us. Ain't what we do. Our brand is, we punish the scum who infest these streets, we disinfect this town with fire. We are the pursuing bloodshed. We don't go grabbin' kittens outta trees, or haulin' buses off bridges—**

“I want to.” Robbie started the car.

**You'll cause a panic.**

“Well, that'll be entertaining for you. Light us up.”

**No.**

Robbie tightened and relaxed his hands on the wheel. The dispatcher continued to repeat her requests, got a few answers from units on the West and East sides of the river. Traffic was just past its peak, it would be many minutes before someone could get to the bridge and address the bus, and she'd received further reports confirming that the bus was teetering over the river. “I can help those people,” Robbie said slowly, “and you're stopping me.”

**It's for your own good, Robbie. Too many witnesses, all sober, mostly credible.**

_Identify the problem._ “I don't care. I want to help.”

**No you don't. You don't give a shit.**

Robbie pulled back out into the street, scanned for a good garbage alley to burn up in. His heart was pounding, even though the pulse of the engine was low, steady. “It doesn't matter if I give a shit or not. There's a problem. I can fix it. I can protect people.” He found an alley with no cameras, pulled in. He reached for the fires, but Eli was giving him nothing. The dispatcher continued her calls for a tow truck, an edge of tension sharpening her voice. Robbie tensed his jaw and a cold sick shock of frustration rushed through him. “Eli. You're my problem.”

And the fires bloomed.

His body boiled and charred into ash, the car vomited flame, the engine snarled and the blower sang. The Rider slammed the Charger into reverse and whipped out into traffic. An oncoming Windstar just missed him. Robbie was square in the center of the Rider, united with the body, urging his rage forward instead of reining it back. _Port us to the river or I'm driving there the long way._

**You're lucky I changed my mind.**

_Sure. Prove it._

The Rider screamed into the right side of the road, weaving through traffic, back and forth across the centerlane. Cars swerved aside when they saw the flames, honked angrily as he passed.

**You're gonna kill someone, you self-righteous prick.**

The Rider focused hard and phased the car right through an oncoming semi-truck. _You say we're partners? Prove it. Prove I need you._

**Of course you need me. You owe me!**

_I'm getting to Figueroa Bridge sooner or later. If you don't help, you're in my way. The angrier you make me, the less I need you. The less I need you, the less I owe you._

**You insolent cunt. I gave you your life back.**

The Rider sounded the horn and it howled like a thousand air raid sirens. He cut through a red light and wove East, toward the river. He felt Eli trying to tamp down the fires, and the blaze from his vents roared hotter in his outrage.

_Looks like I don't need you._

**Yes, you do.** Fire and darkness opened in the air in front of the Charger and they plunged in. Dropped out, skidding on the forty-degree concrete slopes of the Los Angeles River, north of midtown. The whole flat bed of the arroyo was rushing with rain-surge, a foot deep, deceptively flat. The Rider cranked the wheel, skidded around on the steep slope, phased the tires partway through the wall of the bank for traction, and opened the throttle to race downstream, thigh and shoulder digging into the bucket seat. He scanned the concrete bellies of the freeway bridges overhead. He was looking for a smaller bridge. A sharper curve. Low and close to the river.

And there he saw it: what looked like an entire city bus leaning over the curve of a bridge, right over the river, even higher over the concrete bed than he'd imagined it. He cranked the wheel uphill to the west bank, burned through a row of oleander bushes, melted through the chainlink fence that cordoned off the river and flattened a guardrail on his way back toward level pavement. He crashed through some more guardrails and a concrete median on his way to the Eastbound lanes of the Figueroa bridge.

The bus turned out to be part of the tail of a pile-up. A dozen cars in various states of damage and one overturned semitruck blocked both eastbound lanes. Drivers were clustered around the shoulder by the guardrail, some panicked, some bleeding and dazed, most on their phones: yelling at emergency dispatchers, or filming. He slowed enough to weave his way through the stopped cars and the scattered bits of tires and plastic fascia. As he passed, those filming phones turned toward him.

He had to phase through the semi-trailer to reach the bus. It was huge, flopped over sideways, double-length with a flexible joint in the middle. He was staring at its wheelbase. Whoever had called it “unstable” had understated the problem: the engine-end of the bus was two-thirds over the guard-rail, its weight making the hinge and tail of the bus jack-knife skyward. The hinge-point was so bent that the two halves of the bus had twisted sixty degrees to one another; he saw broken welds in each of the two frames. Even if the hinge had been designed to support the weight of the bus and its passengers, the steel it was attached to could give at any moment. To compound the problem, the engine side was heavier than the half that remained on the bridge. A cluster of bystanders ringed the rear window of the bus, and as he watched a couple passengers bolted away to safety. The bus shifted on its fulcrum as they left. The bridge-side bus was losing ballast.

The Rider drew close. A woman looked over her shoulder at him, swore, tapped the shoulder of the man beside her. Now they were all staring at the Charger, backs to the bus. He circled around to the window, saw passengers retreating further into the bus, putting more pressure on the hinge and raising the engine end infinitesimally: good on the face of it, but if people kept moving back and forth inside, they'd eventually walk the damn thing right over the edge.

Step one, reinforce the damaged link. He reversed back to the undercarriage of the bus, melted out of the car, and jumped up to the hinge, chain in hand. Clambered along the shocks and skirting to find a likely-looking strut on either side of the hinge and chained them together.

The bridge was a simple concrete curve, just a road bed on top and pillars on the bottom. Nothing much to anchor a chain to, other than the car, which could dig into the top six inches of the road bed for whatever traction that was worth. He doubted the concrete under his tires could resist forty tons of lift if the bus really started to move.

On the other side of the bus, however, was a traffic jam.

He walked through the arch made by the upraised hinge of the fallen bus, the coiled free end of his chain around his shoulders. The westbound lanes were packed solid, two by two, a few bumper-crunchers here and there, but no crumpled cars, no spin-outs like on the east side of the crash. He spotted another semi-truck, idling. An F-350. A dozen different vehicles in reach, dozens of tons of steel.

Phones and camera flashes greeted him, and people yelling: “Holy shit! Mira, eso es La Leyenda! It's our guy, it's that supervillain! Pinche Diablo! Don't hurt them! Save them, Roast Rider!”

He needed hooks. Lots of hooks. No: he needed a pulley. Three, no, seven pulleys, single channels, big enough for the chains to run through, and he needed a lot of chain. Longer, in sections. Hooks, yes, a hook at each end. He counted on his fingers, tuning out the din of the crowd, the people running, the people drawing clear, climbing up into truck beds and onto bumpers for a better view. Seven pulleys, seven chains arranged in a tree. Four pairs of cars sharing the load, all feeding down to the single chain that held the hinge of the bus. No mechanical advantage for this, these were just to distribute force. _“I need forty tons of counterweight,”_ he demanded.

The F-350 started up. There were cars in front and behind it, nowhere for it to go. It reversed two feet, then stopped when the car behind it laid on the horn.

“ _Hyiiiiiirh,_ ” the Rider snarled, pointing through the windshield of the F-350. A white-faced man in a camo hat lifted his hands off the wheel. The Rider dropped onto his back and shoved himself under the front bumper, hooked one end of the rapidly-dividing snarl of chains into the F-350's front tow mounting hook. He stood, scanned the traffic jam. A Yukon. Yes. A U-Haul. That, too. The semi-truck: he needed that.

The driver of the semi-truck saw him looking, climbed down, and stopped four feet away from him as he stood up from hooking his chain into the nose of a lawn maintenance company's flatbed. “¿Estan calientes?” He pointed at the chain. “Those hot, son? I'll take two. Dame dos.”

The Rider, Robbie, shook out one pulley and two hook ends, whirled them through the air overhead until he felt the fires start to fade, the steel grow numb. He dropped them on the ground at the man's feet. “ _Ya no. Gracias_.”

“Buen plan, continua.” The trucker dragged them away, and the Rider let the chains spool after him, longer and longer, until he hooked them into the frame of his own truck. Kept working. Other drivers approached him; he eyed their vehicles, cooled the hooks down before he passed them out.

Six three-ton vehicles and one twenty-ton. All that weight to fight the pull of the engine-side of the bus against the hinge, to act as a new fulcrum for the Charger to pull against. “ _No se muevan. Keep your brakes on,_ ” he growled at the traffic jam, at the cameras, at the awed and observant faces. He burned and dropped through his own shadow, melted back into the Charger.

New chain, new pulley. A pair of pulleys, with three channels: mechanical advantage, this time. The same block-and-tackle setup Canelo had at the shop for hoisting engines, old-school, that winched up with the hand crank: he wanted it and then he had it in his hands. He backed the car up against the rolled semi-truck that lay on its side opposite the bus, flowed out of the back bumper to reach its undercarriage. He hooked one pulley into the truck's front tow hook; the other pulley, with a hook on an extension, he tossed toward the side of the bridge. The working end stayed with the Charger, growing out through the steel.

He spooled out the chains, feeling stretched thin. How much steel could the car manifest? If there was a limit, he might be reaching it.

He dropped through the dark, hauled out of the shadow under the bus. The heat from his vents crisped the plastic advertising wrap that coated the window over his head; he looked up and saw people huddled on the windows, an overturned wheelchair.

The bus shifted again. He saw that it rested on a dent in its side wall, a precarious edge. As the bus moved, the dent in the steel spread, threatening to break the windows the passengers rested on.

He retrieved the lifting-end of the pulley system, hopped over the guard rail on the side where the bus's undercarriage faced sideways, the concrete riverbed stretching down a hundred feet below his toes. He scanned the bus for a likely attachment point for his hoist, took aim at the upper side of the frame just behind the front wheel well. Felt the satisfying grip of steel on steel as the hook landed. Jumped back to the hinge, inspected the other chain that kept the bus from ripping apart or sliding the rest of the way over the edge, hauled all the slack in until he could feel the tree of hooks tug against the cars of the traffic jam. Stabilizer chain tight. Hoist chain fixed to the Charger, ready to haul the front of the bus back onto the bridge.

He let the Charger's wheels sink as deep as they could into the concrete and put it in first, hauling foot by foot on the three-tiered pulley system that would drag the bus's front axle toward the overturned semi-truck and back onto the roadway. His clutch slipped and burned; he couldn't let it all the way out, or the strain would kill the engine. The Charger wasn't geared to move that slow.

The pulley tightened slowly. Between the anchoring pull of the west-side vehicles and the eastward draw of the pulley, the bus rolled twenty degrees, tilting up on its edge toward the undercarriage. That wasn't right, that wasn't what he wanted. The Rider melted back into the shadow of the bus beyond the guardrail, braced his feet in the concrete edge, and heaved up against the bus with his back, denting the steel but shoving it sideways, over the rail, toward the roadway. His engine lugged as he pushed, straining under the dual loads of hauling against the pulley and lifting against the bus. He felt his number seven cylinder detonating, wasting power, a sharp pain deep in his heart. He relaxed the carburetor, thinned the fuel-air mix. In desperation he depressed the clutch a little more, the taste of frying clutch pads acrid in his throat, and the engine stopped lugging and banging, the tachometer rose back to operating range.

It would heal. It would heal. He lifted and hauled, and the bus began to move, productively, as the pulleys creaked: steel sliding and scraping along the concrete rail, the tilted section of the bus rising toward level, twenty-five degrees, twenty, fifteen. The flatter it got, the easier it was to drag, the smoother the wall of the bus scraped over the barrier, the less the burn of the clutch, the less the screaming of the passengers inside the bus at every movement. Soon it was level. Almost. Almost. He eased the Charger forward foot by foot, the chain stretching out behind it, the pulley blocks almost touching. And then the bus lifted off his shoulders, the hinge dropped to the road bed, and the whole thing rocked to rest on the bridge with a groan. Stable.

He burned back into the Charger, felt his seat at his back and his wheel in his hands, called back all his chains and felt the relief as all his steel snapped back where it belonged. Bystanders swarmed the bus, unloading the passengers who'd been stranded in the front half, old men and women, kids, college students. A crowd was forming at the back of the bus.

His fire was thin, easy. Robbie was very close to the surface. He felt satisfied. He'd done a good thing. Fixed something. Stopped a city bus from rolling off a bridge into the LA river, saved what looked like twenty people, hadn't crippled or terrorized anyone.

**See, we're a great team. Partners.**

The fires flared and he shook his head hard. _You did literally nothing._

**I got you here.**

_Thanks. Now could you please get us out of here._

A small fist knocked twice on his window. He turned in his seat, startled. An old woman stood beside the Charger, blowing on her knuckles. He looked back and forth. A little knot of people stood behind her, as though her body offered cover should the Rider turn hostile. He rolled his window down.

“Leyenda. Thank-you for helping those people.”

He watched. People were filming him. _Eli, I really think we need to go._

**What. Bask in the adulation of your adoring public. Ain't that the point of this exercise? You gonna join the Avengers or some shit?**

The woman pointed to the guardrail beside the bus. “I know you can understand me. Thank-you for your help. But there was a car. Closer to the bank. It went over. I looked, but I didn't see it. The floodwaters, they don't have to be deep to wash a car away.”

The fires flared. Panic. “ _What model._ ”

“What?”

Nevermind. “ _HiiYAAAAAARRM,_ ” he snarled, reversing and flinging himself through a three point turn until he faced the barrier, a spot well away from the bus. He revved up for a hot start and screeched forward, shattering the concrete and leaping out into space.

He hit the sloping wall of the river at an angle, crushing his left front quarter panel and briefly collapsing half his cabin, the steering wheel merging through his torso until he stretched out and healed.

No crumple zone. The car that went over the edge, it would've hit the wall, too, perhaps at the same place he had, but if their car was reasonably new, they might still be alive, the front fascia and the engine compartment soaking up the impact, the passenger cabin rolling down the bank. Rushing away with the floodwater. A moving target for rescue crews.

Why did it have to be the day after a rain?

He hit the bottom and sped across the surface of the river, clouds of steam rising above and to either side of him.

He could smell it, sometimes. In the salvage yards, when he used to go poking around looking for parts, he could smell the rot, the meat. Piss. Rancidity. Dried blood. He never knew, from the smell alone, whether a particular car had seen someone die. But from the damage to the passenger cabin, he could often guess.

Robbie had never seen a fatal car accident up close. Eli had caused a few, stopped by the wrecks to finish off any survivors. The Rider could imagine what he might find, and he didn't like it.

The Charger sped across the surface at two hundred miles an hour. The river was moving at thirty miles an hour. It would be...it was thirty seconds before they rounded a corner and the fallen car came into view. The Rider threw the Charger into a powerslide, digging the wheels beneath the surface until they drifted with the current alongside a chunk of plastic fascia, and the noseless remains of a Toyota 4-Runner, the roof dented, windows shattered, drifting with the current on its left side, but the passenger enclosure entirely intact. Dangling airbags screened the interior from view.

The Rider stood up through the Charger's roof, flung out a hook, and snagged the wreck's front pillar. Then he put the car back in gear, spun his wheels until he rose to the surface on a blast of steam, drove off, and let the chain spool out of his hand until the wheels bit into the concrete wall. He grabbed the chain tight and hauled, driving up the bank as he reeled it back into himself, hand-over-hand.

The current dragged the wrecked 4-Runner downstream of him, swinging it toward the shore when the chain drew taut. The floodwaters rose and foamed around the car, no longer carrying it along, but pounding and rocking it in muddy runoff. As he hauled it close, the cabin nudged the concrete slope and tilted sideways, toward its roof. The driver’s head was underwater. He gunned the motor, raced downstream until he was straight up the slope from the car, and yanked, the blower whistling, until the cabin scraped along the river bank and all the floodwater drained out the rear windows. It was much lighter than the bus. Even though there were fewer lives at stake, his fires were hotter: these lives were more critical.

The clouds parted in the overcast sky, dousing him in sunlight, making the water gleam.

He left the car idling, tires embedded in the concrete bank, laid down on his hip and skidded down along the chain to the car. Grabbed the roof of the 4-Runner and heaved it back up onto its two remaining wheels to balance precariously, hanging on the slope by the chained roof-pillar. He reached through the shattered windows and opened the doors.

Screaming black-haired toddler in the right-hand carseat. Silent infant on the left. A woman in the driver’s seat, blood on her head, also silent.

_No. No._

The Rider reached for the woman’s neck, the way Eli did to confirm a kill. A slow pulse. He did the same to the infant as the other child screamed. Nothing. The infant looked blue. Their neck was soft and fleshy, and possibly, _possibly_ concealed a heartbeat.

The Rider roared in panic, flames jetting at the sky. Anger and hatred were no use here; there was nothing to avenge, no-one to destroy, but these people didn’t deserve what had happened to them. They deserved to live. If only he had left the bus—but would the bus have toppled? If only he had approached the bridge from the south, he would have seen the car.

He remembered when the paramedics came to revive Lenny when he’d OD’d out by the resource pile. They gave him a stick into a vein—finding the vein was the hardest part, and then he kicked out and started cursing them, it was like magic. This wasn’t the same. But maybe there was something they could do, if he got there fast enough.

He reached through his shadow for a knife from the trunk and cut the kids’ carseats free. Ran back up to the car, doors opening and passenger seat folding down as he approached, and dropped the kids on the back bench, seats and all. He dropped through his shadow and hauled out from under the wrecked car, cut the woman free. Cradled her in his arms, steam rising from her clothes and hair where she touched his skin. He laid down his passenger seat, set her down, tried to steady her head. He let the chain melt back into the car, and the wreck slide back into the river.

 _Hospital._ Panic and urgency consumed him as he revved the motor; sparks flared between his teeth and his fists clenched the wheel. _**Hospital now.**_

A black hole whirled open against the concrete before him, infinite dark against the sunlit cement. He heel-toed the brake and gas, slammed the shifter home, popped the clutch and leapt into the void.

He slammed back into the world in the back lot of the East Los Angeles Medical Center. Kept driving, burned over medians, phased through parked cars, came to a blazing diagonal stop at the tall glass vestibule of the emergency entrance. He saw an aisle clear of people in the lobby and phased right through the glass.

Screaming. People in the waiting chairs bolted to the sides of the lobby, those who were mobile enough. The receptionist stood up, hand raised as though she could ward off a tidal wave with the force of her glare.

The Rider stood, melted out of the car, opened both doors. “ _ **They’re dying. Help them.**_ ” He bent over the woman in the passenger seat, remembered years ago when Eli refitted the Charger from a front bench to bucket seats, remembered the bolts and tracks that held the seat in. Unscrewed everything with a thought and lifted the seat and the woman out together. Foam gathered at her nose and mouth. He propped the seat up against a lobby chair to keep her from tipping over, then leaned back into the car to grab the baby.

The baby was still blue, still motionless.

A sharp, amplified voice over the speakers. “Code Blue, Code Blue to Emergency Reception. Repeat, Code Blue to Emergency Reception.”

He set the baby down on the floor beside the woman. Then the screaming toddler.

“Two code teams to Emergency Reception. One adult, one pediatric. Code Blue.”

The receptionist set down her intercom mic. She gestured at the Rider. “Get over here.”

He looked down at himself, back at the Charger.

“You brought them in, we need to know who they are and what happened.” She waved a form on a clipboard.

Nurses raced in from the double doors beside Reception, rolling a cart and gurney like a luge team running up to the track. They swarmed over the woman and the infant, started chest compressions, covered their faces with masks. The Rider could feel the EMT's working on the woman, pounding through her chest into the springs of the passenger seat until they lifted her to the gurney. He walked to the desk, heat waves rolling off him, flames fading, guttering.

“ _They fell,_ ” he said. “ _Silver Toyota 4-Runner, 2010 or so. Rollover off the Figueroa bridge. Traveled almost two miles._ ”

“Were they conscious when you got them out?”

“ _No._ _ **I did my part. Help them.**_ ”

“Did you administer chest compressions? Rescue breaths?”

“ **Sure. I fried their lungs for you—** _no, I brought them straight here. That’s all I know._ ”

He turned back to the car. A young security guard was dragging the toddler's carseat away, staring down at it—her—in confusion. “It's okay,” he was saying. “Your mom's, uh, we're gonna call your dad, okay? We'll call Daddy?”

The receptionist called out to the Rider. “Sir. Your name, contact information, for the record. Stop, you can't leave yet.”

He stooped to pick up the empty passenger seat, threw it back into the cabin. Bolts and fasteners leapt up to lock it back into place, a relief. He opened the driver's side door and got in. Put it in Reverse.

Two new guards jogged into the lobby from the hall, waving him away from the window he'd driven through. He snarled, weakened flames spitting out again, and gunned the motor aggressively. They scattered. He passed through the glass, immaterial for most of the way—until his front bumper snagged on the windowpane and shattered it.

_Get us somewhere private. We're fading._

**You know why?**

_I don't want to hear it._ He T-turned out the hospital parking lot and felt his fires flare higher, heard the crackle and hiss of sparks between his teeth. The sun was bright, there were cars everywhere. Too many people. Too many obstacles. _Can you do it?_

**With the power you're throwing at me? Barely.**

A black hole opened right under him, and he dropped down. Landed with a jolt and a creak of his shocks in an alley off Ruckleroad Lane, where he'd punched a crater in the asphalt weeks ago. The crater was still there, an inch of rainwater and a litter of beer bottles and fast food wrappers in the bottom. He snuffed out, unable to hold on any longer.

Robbie patted himself down. Jeans. Jacket. Pockets. He dug his phone out and checked the current weather—eighty degrees, overcast. He might still be able to pick up a pax without giving them heat stroke, just leave the cabin air blowing, crack the windows. Get another twenty bucks or so. He got out, leaned hard on the roof for a moment, and opened the trunk for his bottle of Febreeze.

Those poor people. They were almost dead when he got them to the hospital. The baby—babies were so fragile. The baby wasn't breathing.

But that whole city bus, two dozen passengers on board, would have been in similar straits. A hundred-foot vertical drop onto concrete, no crumple zone, no airbags. He'd saved them. He'd protected them. He'd done a good thing.

**This was stupid. You got us unnecessary exposure. You almost snuffed out right in the middle of the hospital. We're the pursuing bloodshed, the red hand of justice. This saving-kittens shit goes against our nature.**

_Maybe,_ Robbie admitted, misting the car's interior with Febreeze and flapping the driver's side door open and closed to get the air moving. _But it's what Ninja Wolf's Best Friend would do._

**Don't make me gag.**

**All we did was delay the inevitable. Life is temporary; you fight for life, you're on the losing side. Death lasts.**

Robbie ignored him. Sniffed the air away from the car, stuck his head in and sniffed again. A little crispy, burnt. Like fireworks. But not overpowering. Pax shouldn't complain about the smell on their clothes. He turned on Uber again.

**That baby, what did we really do? Condemn 'em to a life of brain damage—shoulda just left 'em where we found 'em, it'd be—**

Robbie snarled and threw his phone into the car so it wouldn't burn in his hand.

“ _Fuck you,_ ” he spat. There was a rumble in his voice, and a shrill overtone. His breath steamed and his hands shook. “Todo que lo me digas es una mamada. Te measte en esta cerveza, bébelo tú mismo. _You_ are my problem. And I'm gonna find someone to rip you out of me. I don't care who I have to ask—San Benito or the Queen of Limbo. I don't care what happens after.”

Eli was silent for a long while. Long enough for Robbie to breathe deep, stuff his fires back down, and get back in the car. He prayed. _Holy Mother, no one, not even the Cursed One himself, can snatch the ribbon of my life from your loving care._

And then, to keep the fires down: _Later. Later._

He was cruising toward Downey to pick up a late-morning commuter when Eli spoke again. **I just want to survive,** Eli said. **I brought you back. You want to be ungrateful, fine. I can't expect better from an arrogant sonofabitch like you. But if you break our deal, there will be consequences I can't protect you from. And I've told you. We can't be separated. We're one and the same.**

Robbie clenched his jaw, cranked the wheel around a turn. Took long, even breaths. _We'll see._

 

* * *

 

Buzzfeed News' Los Angeles office received a bubble-wrap envelope containing two jewel-cases, a hand-written list of file-names and timestamps, and a short note. Priority mail. The postmark was from Nevada, a Tuesday. When reporter who received the package contacted the East Los Angeles Police Department, after carefully copying the disks, the police found no fingerprints on any of the envelope's contents and verified that Iris Gutierrez-Bao had been in Los Angeles, meeting with clients about patents, when the envelope had been posted.

The jewel-cases and the DVD-ROMs within were identical to those used by East LA Medical Center to record security footage; they matched the physical appearance, file-system, and general content expected for those dates. It was impossible to verify the disks' authenticity and rule out editing by some malicious party, but the sheer volume of data would have made falsification a daunting task. Buzzfeed's reporter quickly reviewed the content and published her findings, before the ELAPD could demand otherwise. And Iris Gutierrez-Bao's lawyer demanded copies of the disks for use in her civil suit against Alexander Northwick.

The note was written in pencil in careful block print on blue-lined looseleaf paper. It read:

_Dr. Alexander Northwick hired me to steal these disks from the East Los Angeles Medical Center security records room. He told me to destroy them. I lied and kept them. I thought I could ask him for more money._

_The March 12 disk shows him in the morgue cutting apart the body of a young woman. I believe she is Candace Gutierrez, from the news. I believe he killed her._

_I realized these disks were not my secret to keep. They belong instead to Miss Gutierrez' family, to help them get justice for her murder and destroy everything left of Alex Northwick._

_All killers of innocents must pay._

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Because you're not a real Ghost Rider until you've crashed into a hospital lobby bellowing, "This woman needs medical attention!" 
> 
> The pax cameo at the start of this chapter is Rokhal's mom! Hi, Mom! I promise I am not literally this fucked in the head! It's cool! This is a fictional exaggeration!
> 
> Credit again to heeeymackelena for Spanish grammar; any errors are my own. (This was Maria's prayer again.)
> 
> Thanks for sticking with this rambling, fucked-up story. It...consumed my life.


End file.
